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Customer Challenge

Wells are continuing to increase in complexity in the Oil & Gas industry. Pressure pulse telemetry is a key technology allowing status of downhole operations to be communicated to the surface, improving efficiency of the overall operation. Understanding mechanisms creating these pulses and their interaction with the surrounding flow are important to ensure a robust design. CFD is becoming an increasingly important tool to reduce product development time.

Scope

  • Develop a flow model for Main Valve Assembly (MVA) - Control Valve Assembly (CVA) assembly in pulse mode
  • Evaluate fluid pressure load on the MVA shell at this condition
  • Evaluate sensitivities in the results to mesh and solver settings (initial steps in establishing a best practice)

Solution

  • Case matrix to evaluate sensitivity of the results to solver settings and mesh density
  • Flow analysis of the base and sensitivity cases
  • Post-processed results for pressure load on the MVA shell, and examined the flow field to understand the fluid dynamics in the region near the restriction

Features

Features

  • Provided expertise to the customer for setting up and evaluating flow simulation models
  • Determined an appropriate analysis methodology for this class of flow problems
  • Sensitivity studies allowed optimized mesh size to be determined for both accuracy and time-to-solution

Benefits

  • Quest developed process was reused by customer analysis team
  • In-house fluid dynamics expertise relieved customer bandwidth for development of the process

Results

  • Sensitivity studies allowed optimized mesh size to be determined for both accuracy and time-to-solution