Evaluation of Numerical Simulation Procedures for Prediction of Solids Production in Oil Producing Wells

Solids/sand production is a serious problem faced by the petroleum industry during production stages. Particles or groups of particles of formation rock are produced together with oil or gas being pumped which has highly damaging effects on pipes and valves. Solids production can be caused by several factors including the stresses developed around the boreholes/perforations, the drawdown, mechanical and hydraulic properties of the formation rock and the type of containment measures adopted. Numerical simulation of sand/solids production presents a considerable challenge as intricacies of failure processes must be correctly simulated in order to correctly predict rates of solids production. The present paper is a sequel to the paper presented in the 2011 ARMA Symposium (Muller et al [1]). The 2011 paper presented the development of a finite element based program for simulating the process of solids production, considering fluid-mechanical coupling in standard and Cosserat elasto-plastic continua in a hypothetical borehole. The present paper presents results from the simulation of two observed failure modes in laboratory experiments using the program developed in [1]. The analyzed modes are the slit type mode and the slip lines type mode. Unlike the 2011 paper, the present paper focuses on hydrostatic states of stress only.