Eventos Anais de eventos
ENCIT 2022
19th Brazilian Congress of Thermal Sciences and Engineering
PORE-SCALE SIMULATION OF CaCO3 SCALING EFFECTS ON LOSS OF PRODUCTION IN OIL RESERVOIRS
Submission Author:
João Victor Lopes Marchiori , PR , Brazil
Co-Authors:
João Victor Lopes Marchiori, Rodrigo Prando Pedroni, Renato Siqueira, Ayrton Cavallini Zotelle, Fabio de Assis Ressel Pereira, Andre Leibsohn Martins
Presenter: João Victor Lopes Marchiori
doi://10.26678/ABCM.ENCIT2022.CIT22-0132
Abstract
The oil is one of the biggest commodities and energy sources in the world, being crucial to diverse other industries as an input for their products, such as fuel, plastics and synthetic rubber. However, oil production involves several engineering challenges, including production losses caused by the scaling of inorganic salts throughout the reservoir, completion elements, and production column, causing problems in the extraction of the oil and financial losses. The reservoir is a porous rock that can be constituted of different materials, which has a direct influence on the scaling behavior. There are some critical parameters that influence the carbonate scaling in oil reservoirs, as the critical velocity, which depends on surface energy and Van Der Waals electromagnetic forces, surface roughness and the kinematic interaction involving the angle of impact between the grains of the porous medium and the precipitated particles of inorganic salts, such as the calcium carbonate (CaCO3). This work analyze the influence of the impact angle in the scaling with a defined critical velocity, as well as its influence on the reduction of the flow rate due calcium carbonate scaling by the application of the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) technique in a simplified porous medium. Numerical simulations were used to evaluate the sensibility of scaling to the critical angle of collision, which determines the preferential range that particles adhere to the surface of the porous medium grains. To evaluate this behavior, different impact angle intervals were defined as critical for the scaling to occur, from 0° to 90° with a step of 30°. The model uses a granular flow with a two-way coupling fluid-solid interaction, with the CaCO3 particles represented by a Lagrangian phase with mass fraction of 2% and the fluid is water represented by an Eulerian phase. With the model and the critical parameters implemented, it was possible to verify the effects of different critical angle intervals on scaling, and consequently on the flow rate reduction. The scaling effects were modelled including a source term on momentum equation to determine the additional flow resistance due to the particles adhesion. The results show that at low velocities the collision angles tend to be small, implying a higher adhered mass than to high angles. Furthermore, the reduction in absolute permeability due to scaling generates a non-linear drop in the flow rate. Scaling has greater sensitivity to small collision angles and occurs in preferred regions.
Keywords
Calcium carbonate scaling, Computacional Fluid Dynamics, Porous media, Flow rate, Oil reservoirs
