Study on Sedimentation Characteristics of Sand in Heavy Oil

The sedimentation model considering the irregular morphology of the particles is often complicated. To explore whether the sand sedimentation in the heavy oil can ignore the influence of irregular sand morphology, we used industrial white oils to study the gravity sedimentation behavior of single sand. We carried out a detailed comparison of various spherical and non-spherical particle drag coefficient models and found that the non-spherical particle models that consider the irregularity of the sand particles do not bring higher prediction accuracy. It can be considered that the sand settlement process in the heavy oil can ignore the influence of the morphology. We established two explicit settlement velocity models and compared them with other researchers’ models. We found that one of the self-established explicit settlement velocity models has higher prediction accuracy. The sand particles sedimentation experiment in the real heavy oil also demonstrates the high prediction accuracy of our sedimentation model.