Sand production in an oil or gas well can cause additional operational difficulties, but contributes to production enhancement by improving the well inflow performance. In order to be able to assess the relatve magnitude of those two effects and to optimize the well completion and operation philosophy, a quantitative forecast of the expected amount and rate of sand production must be established. It requires a correct description of all the mechanisms involved in the phenomenon of sand production, sand transport in particular. The proposed numerical method considers that the geomechanical problem (rock failure) interplays with the transport of sand. Equilibrium equations which control rock failure (solid mechanics) and sand transport (fluid mechanics) are solved simultaneously by an iterative coupled scheme at the wellbore scale.Sand production experiments in the laboratory on cohesionless sand samples carried out under CT-scan are used to calibrate the model and show its ability to reproduce the main sand production features. The results of this fully coupled scheme show the importance of the transport of sand within the reservoir, in particular the effect of a non homogeneous slurry viscosity, for a proper modeling of the sand production process.
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