Research Article | OPEN ACCESS
Fill Removal with Foam in Horizontal Well Cleaning in Coiled Tubing
J.A. Khan and K.S. Pao
Mechanical Engineering Department, Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, Bandar Seri Iskandar, 31750 Tronoh, Perak, Malaysia
Research Journal of Applied Sciences, Engineering and Technology 2013 14:2655-2661
Received: February 06, 2013 | Accepted: March 03, 2013 | Published: August 10, 2013
Abstract
Coiled Tubing (CT) services are extensively used in oil industry to clean out the fill produced from wellbore. Recently, the use of foam as cleaning agent has become more popular due to its low density and high viscosity which are desirable in many cleaning operations. The present study is carried out to investigate the suspension of fines in the annulus of CT during cleaning operations. Solid particles were uniformly injected at annulus inlet and sand concentration at each point in the annular was calculated along the horizontal wellbore section. The motion of the particles is calculated under the effect of drag, buoyancy, rotational and virtual mass forces to analyze the settlement of the particles. The foam quality and foam velocity are found to be the deciding factors for the particle depositional pattern. The fill removal efficiency and frictional pressure loss are affected by both the velocity of the annular flow and the quality of the foam.
Keywords:
Coiled tubing, fill concentration, flow velocity foam quality, pressure drop,
Competing interests
The authors have no competing interests.
Open Access Policy
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Copyright
The authors have no competing interests.
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ISSN (Online): 2040-7467
ISSN (Print): 2040-7459 |
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