Effects of Soft Particles on Erosion
Personnel
| Chevron | TU PI's | Students |
|---|---|---|
| Lee D. Rhyne | Brenton McLaury | Hadi Arabnejad |
| Hariprasad J. Subramani | Siamack Shirazi |
Abstract
The erosion of metals by solid particles occurs in many industries. In oil and gas industry, there are many particles that may cause erosion in production and transportation facilities. The most important particles are sand and scale products such as Calcite, Magnetite, Hematite and Barite. Calcite is one of the main scale products which formed due to any change in condition of fluid in the reservoir. Black powder which mainly composed of magnetite is another scale product which forms in the presence of water, oxygen, hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide from corrosion of ferrous steel pipe and Hematite is another corrosion scale of ferrous steel pipe. Barite is another scale product and forms when sea water which is rich in sulfate ion comes in contact with the Barium ion in the brine. So these particles may be present in the system and cause erosion failure in production and transportation facilities and their components. Moreover, some of these particles are being used extensively as a densifying agent in particulate well kill fluids. Although a lot of work has been done on sand erosion but effect of other particles has not been properly investigated. So, there are limited data available about erosive behavior of scale products and due to the different characteristics of the new particles, sand erosion models are not applicable to these particles.
The main goal of this work is to predict erosion failure in drilling, production and transportation facilities due to the impingement of new particles. Two experimental apparatus are designed and constructed, submerged liquid jet in a slurry tank and gas testing with liquid droplets containing particles. In the submerged apparatus, particles are suspended in the slurry tank by means of a stirrer and pushed to a nozzle to hit the target specimen. In the second experimental apparatus pressurized air is supplied to the nozzle to suck slurry mix from the container and form of droplets containing particles to hit the specimen and cause erosion. After completion and verification, the erosion will be correlated to the particle properties as well as impact condition.