TY  - EJOU
AU  - Zeng, Quanshu 
AU  - Wang, Zhiming 
AU  - Yang, Gang 

TI  - Comparative Study on Passive Inflow Control Devices by Numerical Simulation
T2  - Structural Longevity

PY  - 2013
VL  - 9
IS  - 3
SN  - 1944-6128

AB  - 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.<br/>
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.<br/>
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.
KW  - Passive Inflow Control Devices
KW  -  Numerical Simulation
KW  -  Application Evaluation
KW  -  Parameter Optimization

DO  - 10.3970/sl.2013.009.169