Eventos Anais de eventos
COBEM 2021
26th International Congress of Mechanical Engineering
ANALYSIS OF PARTICLES SEDIMENTATION IN SHEAR-THINNING FLUID: SETTLING VELOCITY, DRAG COEFFICIENT, AND SETTLING TRAJECTORIES COMPARISON
Submission Author:
Victor Emanuel Santana , PR
Co-Authors:
Victor Emanuel Santana, Yamid José García Blanco, Eduardo Matos Germer, Admilson Franco
Presenter: Victor Emanuel Santana
doi://10.26678/ABCM.COBEM2021.COB2021-0957
Abstract
In recent years, the Oil and Gas industry has focused on predicting and controlling the different processes involved in oil and gas production, such as the control and prediction of cutting sedimentation during the drilling process. The importance of the subject is to understand the fluid-solid interactions during sedimentation in non-Newtonian fluids. The present work has as objective the contribution to understand and describe the cuttings sedimentation process during the well drilling operation and provide reliable data for future validations of numerical studies related to the sedimentation phenomenon. Therefore, an Arduino infrared release system was developed to settle one particle at the center of a rectangular tank filled by a working fluid in standardized conditions. The first stage of the study was the validation of the experimental setup, whereby tests were performed releasing spherical and non-spherical particles in Newtonian fluids. The results of the settling velocity and drag coefficient were compared with analytical correlations available in the literature. Later, tests with spheres were performed in a fluid with shear-thinning rheological characteristics. The Power-law model well represents such rheological characteristics. The settling velocity and the drag coefficient were also obtained, followed by the particles during the sedimentation process. The drag coefficient showed higher values for non-Newtonian fluid than the Newtonian case, contrary to the behavior of the settling velocity, which tends to be higher for the sedimentation in the Newtonian fluid. The particle’s sedimentation path shows straight and oblique behaviors for the non-Newtonian fluid. For the case of Newtonian fluids, a straight behavior was presented for Reynolds between 50 and 200, for Reynolds close to 300 an oblique behavior was depicted, for Reynolds around to 450 an oblique intermittent behavior and the cases for high Reynolds numbers, between 2000 and 9000, straight and oblique sedimentation trajectories are observed. As proposed, was analyzed the influence of rheological proprieties and conclude that seems affected the sedimentation regime of the particles, the particle shape is another factor of influence, the not spherical particle tends to have more disturbed sedimentation than a sphere.
Keywords
Spherical particle, Non-spherical particle, Sedimentation, shear thinning fluid
