An Investigation of Sand Retention Testing With a View To Developing Better Guidelines for Screen Selection

Abstract

Sand screens for specific applications are often selected by reference to the results obtained from laboratory sand retention testing. Some recent publications have highlighted the problems of running some types of sand retention tests (slurry tests) at high flow rates, such that the differences between wire wraps screens and metal mesh screens may be exaggerated. With these in mind and also to address some general concerns of the authors ways to reduce flow rates in laboratory slurry tests to more realistic levels have been investigated. This has created some unforeseen effects which are discussed; video has proved invaluable in understanding these unforeseen effects. In addition, an attempt has been made to better define plugging within sand retention tests by relating the pressure build-up gradient from slurry tests to characteristics of the sand itself. Although the pressure gradient generally correlates to certain sand size and sorting parameters the spread in data suggests another factor is important. The purpose of this work is to try and better define the differences in performance between different screen designs, primarily wire wrap and metal mesh screens, in order to better define their application envelopes in terms of sand quality and hence develop more definitive guidelines for screen selection.

One-Dimensional Convolutional Neural Network with Adaptive Moment Estimation for Modelling of the Sand Retention Test

“…The factors involved in screen characteristics are weave open volume, type of screen, and screen slot size. Ballard and Beare [6] found that plugging also tends to occur for a small weave open volume. The lower the weave open volume, the higher the tendency of sand to lodge in the weave, reducing the overall area open to flow.…”

“…The PSD of d 1 , d 5 , d 10 , d 30 , and d 50 are used to analyze plugging performance and sand production [3][4][5][6][7][8]. The PSD of d x refers to the percentage of sand in the sample with a specific size.…”

“…In other words, parameters other than d 10 must be considered when choosing the slot width of the sand control screen. In contrast, Ballard and Beare [4,6] used PSD of d 10 and d 30 as an indicator to select the screen slot size, which can control the amount of sand produced for a particular screen. For good sand retention, the screen slot size should be smaller than d 10 because the bigger the screen slot size, the higher the amount of sand produced [7,8].…”

“…If the size of the sand in the sample is mostly less than 45 microns, then the amount of sand that passes through the screen will be high. The sorting and uniformity coefficients show a bad interaction with the amount of sand passing through the weave [4,6]. However, the combination of the fines content with the sorting coefficient gives a good interaction, where a poorly sorted sand with many fine particles results in a high risk of sand production.…”

“…One of the experimental setups of slurry and sand pack tests are shown in Figure 1. However, the SRT problems observed from previous studies [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10] showed no standard guideline to carry out the SRT experiment. There are various experimental setups and different ways of interpreting the results.…”