Tese: Development of a plugin based simulator for wellbore stability analysis and mud weight window optimization
Aluno(a) : Henrique Reis SantiagoOrientador(a): Ivan Menezes
Área de Concentração: Mecânica Aplicada
Data: 30/04/2021
Link para tese/dissertação: https://doi.org/10.17771/PUCRio.acad.57093
Resumo: Well planning presents a major challenge in the oil & gas industry. Wellbore stability analysis is one of the most important steps during well planning and provides the technical basis for a safe drilling operation. Therefore, to be able to comprehend and to predict the physical response of wells is extremely valuable to drilling engineers. In order to achieve wellbore stability, drilling operators control, among other factors, the internal wellbore pressure using the perforation mud weight. The mud pressure is used to balance the stresses at the wellbore region and its value must remain inside a stable window to ensure a safe operation. In this work, we propose a novel simulator to perform wellbore stability analysis and to compute the optimal mud pressure window. The simulator is based on a plugin architecture, which provides a more flexible environment to develop and to extend the simulator or even perform different analyses by exchanging one or more plugins. The ideal internal pressure and mud weight window are computed by solving a root-finding problem based on different failure criteria for the well. The simulator uses the Finite Element Method to solve each geomechanical analysis during the solution procedure, assuming the fluid-mechanical coupling and elastoplastic behavior around the wellbore. The simulator was validated using various examples and wellbore stability analyses were performed on a set of case studies from the literature.