Impact on Casing Design of Thermal Expansion of Fluids in Confined Annuli

Abstract

Summary Existing single-string analysis methods may be inadequate for more difficult casing design problems, such as annular fluid heat-up and platform wellhead thermal growth, which require a multistring (or global) analysis of the whole well system. This paper presents a method for such an analysis and describes a finite-element formulation developed to implement it. The formulation is fully general and is applicable to a wide range of casing-Aubing-design problems.