Analysis of Perforation Erosion Through Computational Fluid Dynamic Modeling

Field and experimental data have shown that perforation erosion during shale gas stimulation invalidates the assumption of a constant coefficient of discharge. However, perforation erosion is not fully understood yet. In this work, a perforation erosion model was built using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and validated against laboratory data. We then conducted parametric studies to investigate the impact of treatment rate, proppant concentration, proppant size, and fluid viscosity on perforation erosion. Our results demonstrated that a higher treatment rate and larger proppant lead to higher erosion to the perforation diameter. Perforation erosion decreased when fluid viscosities increased from 10 to 100 cp, and then increased when the fluid viscosity was increased to 1,000 cp. Our new understandings could be applied to improve perforation design in shale wells.