Numerical simulation of gas-liquid-solid three-phase flow in deep wells

Abstract

A gas-liquid-solid flow model which considers the effect of the cuttings on the pressure drop is established for the annulus flow in the deep wells in this paper, based on which a numerical code is developed to calculate the thermal and flow quantities such as temperature and pressure distributions. The model is validated by field data, and its performance is compared with several commercial software. The effects of some important parameters, such as well depth, gas kick, cuttings, and drilling fluid properties, on the temperature and pressure distributions are studied. © 2013 Jianyu Xie et al.