Power consumption of wellbore drilling in oil and gas exploitations count for 40% of total costs, hence power saving of WBM (water-based mud) by adding different concentrations of Al2O3, TiO2 and SiO2 nanoparticles is investigated here. A high-speed Taylor–Couette system (TCS) was devised to operate at speeds 0–1600 RPM to simulate power consumption of wellbore drilling using nanofluids in laminar to turbulent flow conditions. The TCS control unit uses several sensors to record current, voltage and rotational speed and Arduino microprocessors to process outputs including rheological properties and power consumption. Total power consumption of the TCS was correlated with a second-order polynomial function of rotational speed for different nanofluids, and the correlated parameters were found using an optimization technique. For the first time, energy saving of three nanofluids at four low volume concentrations 0.05, 0.1, 0.5 and 1% is investigated in the TCS simulating wellbore drilling operation. It is interesting to observe that the lower concentration nanofluids (0.05%) have better power savings. In average, for the lower concentration nanofluids (0.05%), power was saved by 39%, 30% and 26% for TiO2, Al2O3 and SiO2 WBM nanofluids, respectively. TiO2 nanofluids have better power saving at lower concentrations of 0.05 and 0.1%, while Al2O3 nanofluids have saved more power at higher concentrations of 0.5 and 1.0% compared with their counterpart nanofluids.
An API standard drilling fluid was investigated from laminar to turbulent flow conditions using an in-house-built viscometer at speeds from 200 to 1600 RPM. A power-based method was applied to obtain the apparent viscosity and the shear stress of the water-based drilling mud (WBM) in the annulus of the viscometer. Then, a MATLAB optimization program was developed to obtain model parameters for five rheology models integrated in a generalized Herschel-Bulkley-Extended (HBE) model and two widely used 4-parameter models in drilling industry. It is found that the Bingham, Cross, and HBE rheology models have precisely matched the WBM measurements in the viscometer. A generalized Reynolds number was applied to determine the Darcy friction factor although the PL (power law model) and the HB (Herschel-Bulkley model) exhibited a nonrealistic negative shift from the laminar friction factor.
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