Events

Speaker:  Dr. Somnath Mondal, Production Technologist in the Unconventional Gas and Tight Oil R&D team at Shell

Title of Seminar: “Jamming in Granular Flows: Modeling and Applications”

Abstract: Granular or particle-laden flows occur in a variety of petroleum systems such as fines migration, proppant transport, sand control and flow assurance to name a few.  Though we understand the interaction between individual particles relatively well, the behavior of many particles combined as a system is fairly complex.  One such behavior is jamming. As particulate suspensions flow through a medium, particles are often retained at constrictions such as pore throats, outlets, or orifices when several particles attempt to flow through the constriction simultaneously and form a particle bridge that jams the flow. This seminar presents a multi-pronged effort at modeling the flow of suspensions with the two objective: 1) to understand the nature of jamming events and 2) to predict the amount of particles that are produced prior to jamming. Numerical (DEM and CFD-DEM), analytical and stochastic models will be shown that can be used depending on the concentration regime of the suspension. Applications of the research in sand control, screen design, proppant transport, and Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) interpretation will also be shared.

Biography:   Somnath Mondal is a Production Technologist at Shell in the Unconventional Gas and Tight Oil R&D team. In his current role as the technical focal point for the field trials of a novel hydraulic fracturing fluids, he supports operations, pilot design, integrated data analysis, modeling, and experiments. His research interests include completions effectiveness, fracture interference, near-wellbore pressure transients, and flow of particulate matter. Somnath holds a Bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India, and a Masters and PhD degree in Petroleum Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin. Somnath joined Shell upon graduation in 2013.