Abstract
The drilling mud is essentially used in oil and gas development. There are several roles of using the drilling mud, such as cleaning the bottomhole, cooling and lubricating the drill bit and string, transporting the cuttings to the surface, keeping and adjusting the wellbore pressure, and preventing the collapse of the wellbore. The fragments from rocks and micro-sized bubbles generated by the high pressure are mixed in the drilling mud. The systems to separate those mixtures and to keep the uniformly maintained quality of drilling mud are required. In this study, the simulation is conducted to verify the performance of the mud tank's agitation capacity. The primary role of the mud tank is the mixing of mud at the surface with controlling the mud condition. The container type is chosen as a mud tank pursuing efficient transport and better management of equipment. The single- and two-phase simulations about the agitation in the mud tank are performed to analyze and identify the inner flow behavior. The convergence of results is obtained for the vertical- and axis-direction velocity vector fields based on the grid-dependency tests. The mixing time analysis depending on the multiphase flow conditions indicates that the utilization of a two-stepped impeller with a smaller size provides less time for mixing. This study's results are expected to be utilized as the preliminary data to develop the mixing and integrating equipment of the onshore drilling mud system.
