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ENCIT 2020
18th Brazilian Congress of Thermal Sciences and Engineering
PARTICLE SETTLING IN A THIXOTROPIC FLUID USING LATTICE BOLTZMANN METHOD
Submission Author:
Marco Aurélio Ferrari , PR
Co-Authors:
Marco Aurélio Ferrari, Alan Lugarini de Souza, Admilson Franco
Presenter: Marco Aurélio Ferrari
doi://10.26678/ABCM.ENCIT2020.CIT20-0163
Abstract
Settling phenomenon is present in several industrial activities, such as in cuttings transport and vertical gravel pack in oil wellbores, and sedimentation of weighting agent in a heavy mixture. In particular, for the oil and gas industry, knowing the cuttings settling velocity in drilling mud is important since in some cases is necessary to determine the cuttings build-up rate at the bottom of the well. The drilling fluids often exhibit a property denominated thixotropy, or time-depend rheology, which is manifested by the mud's gelification and consequent reduction of the terminal velocity of the particle. In the present work a direct numerical simulation (DNS) using the coupling of the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM), extended to accommodate a thixotropic fluid model based in a structural parameter, and the immersed boundary method (IBM) are used to understand how the particle settling velocity changes with the rheological parameters. Considering that fluid starts to age as soon as the particle starts to settle, the velocity reaches a peak value and posteriorly slows down until it reaches a steady-state, sometimes reaching velocities below 10% of an unstructured fluid.
Keywords
Thixotropy, Particle settling, Lattice Boltzmann Method, Immersed Boundary Method
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