We numerically investigate the effect of the shape of sand grains on the reduction in permeability of reservoir rocks, known as sanding, which is a problem in oil or gas production. Small sand grains produced in reservoirs due to the change in the effective stress in the reservoirs or many other causes such as ressure gradient, viscosity of fluid, the investigation of the phenomena has not been well investigated in the past. In the present study, we focus on the effect of sand grains when passing through pore space in reservoir, and tried to simulate how the shape of sand grains influences the permeability. We adopt the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method to simulate the multi-phase flow with arbitrary shapes of grains. Porous media and sand grains are modeled by particles, and numerical experiments of solid-liquid flow are conducted. We simulate with different shapes of grains, and investigate the permeability change with their passage in pore space. Our results show that time variations of permeability depend on the shape of grains. The reduction of permeability is induced by the blockage of a flow channel in the porous medium. This indicates that the evaluation of sanding has to take into account the effect of the shape of small grains.
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