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<h1 align="center" style="text-align:center"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman";
color:windowtext">Determining Gravelpack Fluidization Flow Velocity
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<p class="MsoHeader" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman"">Ankit Bhowmick Dissertation<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
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<p class="MsoHeader" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">Defense Date:</span></b><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman""> Thursday, December 7<sup>th</sup> 2017
<b>Time: </b>10:00 am <b>Location Room:</b> 124, Building 9, ERP<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoHeader" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">Committee Members:</span></b><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman""> Dr. Christine Ehlig-Economides, Dr. George K. Wong, and Mr. Rod Kirkpatrick<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<span style="font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman"">In a gravelpack completion, non-uniform reservoir inflow with very high velocity can fluidize the gravel and/or erode the sand screen. Previous works have addressed the risks of fluidizing the gravelpack
in high flow rate deepwater wells and have quantified a critical velocity above which fluidization is at risk. However, no formal mathematical model has justified the value, and details of the failure mechanism are lacking.
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;text-justify:inter-ideograph"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman""> The gravelpack screen is equipped with a basepipe with a pattern of holes through which fluid must pass after
flowing through the gravelpack and screen. In a cased hole completion fluid reaches the pack through a pattern of perforation tunnels opening into the pack. The result is a complex flow pattern inside the pack involving both vertical and annular flow in addition
to the expected radial flow. Alternatively, during high rate flow, alignment of a single perforation with a hole in the basepipe could produce a jet effect.
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;text-justify:inter-ideograph"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman""> The aim of this thesis is determine the minimum fluidization velocity in a gravelpack completion with given
casing, screen, and basepipe geometries. The ANSYS-FLUENT simulator enables modeling of flow through the gravelpack governed by the particle motion phenomena according to the Euler-Euler approach that treats each of two phases (inflowing hydrocarbon and the
gravel) as a continuum. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;text-justify:inter-ideograph"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman""> Results of this study will be useful in designing gravelpack completions in ultra-high rate wells.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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