Erosion Analysis

Erosion analysis uses CFD to predict the erosion rates in pipework and equipment carrying particle-laden fluids to assess the integrity of the system. This can be applied to production pipework and equipment, but also to well control equipment for incident response planning (e.g., erosion during well kill & diverter system integrity checks).

If a fluid flow contains solid particles, then erosion of the walls bounding that flow may occur. This causes a wide range of problems and is likely to either raise the costs of developing equipment, so that they may withstand erosion, or raise the costs of operating equipment because of the need to repair and replace worn-out components. It may even cause both to occur. Erosion can also have significant implications for safety and the environment if the failure of a component or pipeline leads to loss of containment of a hydrocarbon.

Wild Well has a long track record of performing erosion analyses using the latest computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques and has validated its analysis methodology against the physical test.

Some of the well control fluids used, such as heavy kill mud are highly erosive, being almost 50 percent solid material. In some well control scenarios, very high flow rates of these aggressive muds are pumped into the well, potentially damaging the well components. Wild Well performs CFD studies to understand the risk to every part of the flow path.