APS March Meeting 2022
Volume 67, Number 3
Monday–Friday, March 14–18, 2022;
Chicago
Session T11: Flow of Complex Fluids, Rheology Structures and Instabilities II
11:30 AM–1:42 PM,
Thursday, March 17, 2022
Room: McCormick Place W-181B
Sponsoring
Unit:
DFD
Chair: Manish Kumar, Purdue
Abstract: T11.00002 : Boundary layer flow of Carbopol gel modeled as a Herschel-Bulkley fluid around a moving plate
11:42 AM–11:54 AM
Abstract
Presenter:
NDRI A KONAN
(National Energy Technology Laboratory)
Authors:
NDRI A KONAN
(National Energy Technology Laboratory)
Eilis Rosenbaum
(National Energy Technology Laboratory)
Mehrdad Massoudi
(National Energy Technology Laboratory)
Wellbore cementing operations are mostly aimed at isolating wells from the invasion and migration of surrounding fluid from the formation, as well as supporting the steel pipe casing in the well center. Cementing consists of pumping cement slurry down to the bottom of the wells, under high pressures through the casing and into the annulus space between the casing and the formation. This results in the slurry flowing upward along the solid boundaries of the formation and the casing, and subsequently filling the space between the actual wellbore and the casing. Cement slurries are yield stress fluids with the yield stress dependent on the shear rate, concentration of cement particles, etc. [see Banfill, 2006]. They exhibit thixotropy, which can be modeled through a dependence of the viscous stress on a structural parameter describing the aggregation degree [Tao et al., 2020]. A less complex problem, related to the flow of a cement slurry along the solid boundaries of the wellbore and the casing, is the flow of a non-thixotropic Carbopol gel which exhibits uniform thickness boundary layer along a moving plate plunged into the gel. This was experimentally studied by Boujlel et al., (2012) and detailed velocity profiles from PIV measurements were provided. We model the Carbopol gel solution as a Herschel-Bulkley visco-plastic fluid. The numerical solutions are calculated by relying on the regularization methods where a singular viscosity at zero strain rate is approximated with a viscosity form dependent on a small parameter and expected to converge to the viscosity at the limit of zero strain [Frigaard & Nouar, 2005]. The methods are implemented as customized non-Newtonian viscosity libraries and solved along with the governing equations in the open-source toolbox/library, OpenFOAM. The results show that the boundary layer thickness is satisfactorily predicted against Boujlel et al., (2012) measurements, along with the fluid recirculation exhibited by the PIV.