Study Of The 1D Three Phase Liquid, Gas And Cutting Model For Vertical Well Flow

Abstract

This is a Master's thesis in Physics, elaborated at the University of Stavanger in the 2014 Fall and 2015 Spring semesters, as partial accomplishment of the duties due in the Master Course in Mathematics and Physics. The need to model the challenges that arises from a three phase flow of liquid, gas and cuttings during a drilling operation, has led to several research in this topic. The challenges one would come across while modeling the flow scenario include, but are not limited to, Counter current flow(i.e heavy mud, cuttings that potentially move downwards, gas migrating upwards), transition to single-phase region, sharp gradients(between gas and liquid), expansion of gas at the top due to low pressure there, high fluid-solid interfacial drag force, high pressure gradient due increased fluid injection rate. Therefore, an e cient model which will seek to address the mentioned challenges is necessary. In this thesis, the use of the numeric Matlab software to generate simulations for the study of the flow scenario shows similar results to other literatures in multiphase flow. The simulation analyses were summarized and recommendations for future work was proposed.