Advances in Numerical Simulation of Coupled Wellbore Fluid Flow and Heat Transfer During Drilling and Well Construction: Models, CFD, Validation, and AI-Assisted Deployment

Wellbore fluid flow and heat transfer are strongly coupled during drilling and well construction, where temperature, pressure, rheology, gas behavior, transient operations, and cementing displacement jointly affect pressure-window control and wellbore safety. This review synthesizes advances in coupled wellbore thermal–hydraulic numerical simulation, emphasizing governing equations, discretization strategies, coupling algorithms, rheology and turbulence closures, verification and validation, computational efficiency, uncertainty quantification, and AI-assisted deployment. A bibliometric-guided critical review was conducted using an 841-record Web of Science corpus, 79 screened technical records, 86 screened OnePetro field-facing records, and representative prior reviews. CiteSpace was used to identify knowledge structure and thematic evolution, while screened records were coded by governing physics, numerical method, closure assumption, model output, validation evidence, and deployment relevance. The literature is organized into five model families: wellbore temperature and heat transfer; annular non-Newtonian flow, rheology, turbulence, and CFD; pressure-window and transient hydraulics; cementing displacement and well-construction flow; and AI-assisted calibration and deployment. The synthesis shows that field-deployable simulation requires consistent state variables, transparent closure hierarchies, benchmark validation, uncertainty reporting, CFD-to-well-scale transfer, reduced-order implementation, and physics-constrained AI updating.