Deflection Criteria for Numerical Assessment of the Sand Production Potential in an Openhole Completion

An elastic-plastic three-dimensional fully coupled model is proposed to model shear and tensile-induced sanding and consequently estimate volume of sand production. The problem is of significant interest to industry since a good estimation of wellface failure and therefore sand production helps the completion engineer to best design downhole completions. Such a design would not only maximize flow rate but also minimize cost of completion. In this investigation, a numerical analysis by using the finite difference method was performed. An elastic-plastic analysis by using the Mohr-Coulomb model was conducted. This model is indeed considered to be the most useful model for geotechnical analysis. For the purpose of this study, the openhole case was considered to have had large deformation and large plastic strains in order to determine the wellface failure and therefore sand production. Effective stress distributions around a wellbore were investigated. Based on this investigation, an effective way to model d...