Eventos Anais de eventos
ENCIT 2022
19th Brazilian Congress of Thermal Sciences and Engineering
FLOW PATTERNS IN HORIZONTAL TRANSPORTATION OF BENTONITE PARTICLES
Submission Author:
Yamid José García Blanco , PR
Co-Authors:
Yamid José García Blanco, Angel De Jesus Rivera Jimenez, LUIS HUMBERTO QUITIAN ARDILA, João Pedro Flórido, Eduardo Matos Germer, Admilson Franco
Presenter: Yamid José García Blanco
doi://10.26678/ABCM.ENCIT2022.CIT22-0400
Abstract
The offshore operations into the Oil & Gas explorations have grown during the last decade, especially in the Brazil’s southeast coast. Nevertheless, the massive extraction of petroleum reserves has dried at least one-third of all oil and gas wells, which has increased the Plugging & Abandonment (P&A) activities. Most abandonment plugs are not checked and are assumed to have properly placed. This situation represents an environmental risk and has demanded properly P&A methodologies from many governments to the oil exploration companies. Bentonite particles have become in an alternative for P&A of oil wells. The bentonite works as an expansive clay that increases its size when it is in contact with water forming a plug. The bentonite plugs have shown to be safer, cleaner and environmentally friendly than the typical materials used for P&A activities, such as cement. In the offshore scenario, the pumping of bentonite particles as a two-phase mixture with oily fluids represents a challenge, due to the vast quantities of particles that need to be displaced to a final target in order to accomplished the plugging process. Then, it is crucial to understand the solid-solid and solid-liquid interactions to avoid excessive pressure losses and premature plugging along the pipeline. Then, the main purpose of the present work is to study the flow patterns during the transportation of irregular bentonite particles in a horizontal pipe with Diesel as a working fluid. The formation of the different particle beds is visualized as a function of the flow regime and the pressure drop along a test section. The results are compared with previous visualization of flow patterns of spherical particles with similar density and flow regimes. It is expected to find a relationship between the geometrical aspect of the particles, the contact properties of the bentonite and the bed particles formation, bed particle regime and the pressure losses along the test section. The experimental results from the present work give interesting information about the mechanism and the interaction of the two-phase flow during the bentonite particle transportation, supporting with reliable data the execution of P&A activities in offshore operations.
Keywords
Plug & abandonment, bentonite particles, Flow patterns, solid-liquid interactions, pressure losses
