Experimental study on cuttings transportation in turbulent pipe flow

Master's thesis in Petroleum engineeringExperimental investigation on cuttings transportation in turbulent flow, in both horizontal and inclined pipes were performed in the multiphase-laboratory at the University of Stavanger. Spherical glass particles were used to indicate the cuttings transportation. The focus of the experiments was to investigate how pipe inclination, flow rate, particle size and rotation on drill string (DS) affect the particle transport. Different experiments were conducted for single-phase water flow and two-phase liquid-particle flow. A medium-scale flow loop was carried out to run different cases of fluid velocity at different inclinations, with and without DS. The pipes in the flow loop were transparent for better visualization of the flow patterns and measuring the liquid and particle velocity profiles. Both the particle image velocimetry (PIV) and ultrasonic velocity profile (UVP) measurement techniques were applied. The results showed that the different pipe inclinations influenced on particle flow patterns. At higher pipe inclination, the transitions in flow patterns were occurring at lower superficial liquid velocity (Usl). The flow patterns were also affected by the rotation of DS. The rotation of DS caused the particles to be distributed more uniformly in the cross section, which gave a positive impact on the particle transport. The velocity profiles measured by PIV indicated the effect of different parameters like rotation of DS. However, the velocity profiles measured by PIV and UVP were in good agreement