Title: Experimental study and CFD investigation of environment friendly drilling fluid

Authors: Soheil Akbari; Khashayar Mohammadzadeh; Seyed Hassan Hashemabadi

Addresses: Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Research Laboratory, School of Chemical, Petroleum and Gas Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, 16846, Tehran, Iran ' Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Research Laboratory, School of Chemical, Petroleum and Gas Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, 16846, Tehran, Iran ' Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Research Laboratory, School of Chemical, Petroleum and Gas Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, 16846, Tehran, Iran

Abstract: Environment-friendly drilling fluids have been developed recently, which protect the environment and satisfy needs of drilling engineering. In this study, to investigate the advantage of using environment-friendly drilling fluid, four (three vegetable and one diesel) oil-based fluids were prepared and their rheological properties were compared. Results showed that all fluids follow non-Newtonian Herschel-Bulkley model with high accuracy, and increasing of temperature results reduction of the fluid's apparent viscosity. Then, in order to study the cutting carrying capacity of the prepared drilling fluids in wellbore, a 3D form of steady-state computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model is used to simulate the flow in different conditions. The CFD results indicated that the vegetable oil muds represent better cutting transportation, especially in lower flow rates. For the fluid velocity of 0.75 m/s by increasing temperature from 320 to 363 K in constant pressure, the cutting transportation has been decreased by 4.21% and 3.07% for diesel and vegetable muds respectively. [Received: April 19, 2018; Accepted: May 10, 2019]

Keywords: oil-based drilling fluid; vegetable oil; diesel oil; computational fluid dynamics; CFD; cutting transport; temperature.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOGCT.2020.111152

International Journal of Oil, Gas and Coal Technology, 2020 Vol.25 No.4, pp.377 - 399

Received: 19 Apr 2018
Accepted: 10 May 2019
Published online: 11 Nov 2020 *

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