Open Access

ARTICLE

Comparative Study on Passive Inflow Control Devices by Numerical Simulation

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1 MOE Key Laboratory of Petroleum Engineering , China University of Petroleum, Beijing, China.
2 Corresponding author. MOE Key Laboratory of Petroleum Engineering, China University of Petroleum (Beijing), 18 Fuxue Road, Changping Dist, Beijing, 102249, China. Email: wellcompletion@126.com.

Structural Longevity 2013, 9(3), 169-180. https://doi.org/10.3970/sl.2013.009.169

Abstract

In long horizontal wells, the production rate at the heel is typically higher than that at the toe. The resulting imbalanced production profile may cause early water or gas breakthrough into the wellbore. Once coning occurs, well production may severely decrease due to limited flow contribution from the toe. To eliminate this imbalance, inflow control devices (ICDs) are placed in each screen joint to balance the production influx profile across the entire lateral length and to compensate for permeability variation.
Currently, there are four different Passive ICD designs in the industry: nozzlebased, helical channel, tube-type and hybrid channel. They respectively use restriction mechanism (nozzle-based), friction mechanism (helical channel) or both mechanisms (tube-type and hybrid channel) to achieve a uniform inflow profile. However, the reality is that none of these ICDs alone meets the ideal requirements of an ICD designed for the life of the well: high resistance to plugging and erosion, high viscosity insensitivity. Therefore, the selection and optimization of ICDs for a specific reservoir are still required to be further studied.
In this paper, 4 numerical models of these ICDs with same flow rating resistance were developed to characterize the flow performance based on computational fluid dynamics. The results show that the throttle pressure drop depends mainly on fluid properties, flow rate and geometry parameters of each ICD. For all four ICDs, the throttle pressure drop increases along with fluid viscosity, density and flow rate. The helical channel ICD occupies first place with corrosion resistance, while hybrid channel ICD has least viscosity sensitivity. The parameter optimization of each ICD was researched as well. For a specific reservoir, we will have the ICD with a best pressure drop composition by optimizing its structural parameter, which has a best corrosion resistance and least viscosity sensitivity.

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