A significant proportion of the world oil and gas reserves is contained in weakly consolidated sandstone reservoirs and hence is prone to sand production. Sand production often occurs in the petroleum industry as the result of erosion in reservoir sandstones during hydrocarbon production. Sand production is the cause of many problems in the oil industry and it affects the completion adversely. These problems include, but are not limited to, plugging the perforations or production liner, wellbore instability, failure of sand control completions, additional cost of remedial and cleanup operations, and pipelines and surface facilities erosion. Pressure of upper layers of the earth and the force of locking the earth layers together and hydrodynamic stress caused by the pressure gradient of oil and gas flow cause failure and erosion of the sandstone. Sand production is an important research filed in the oil industry and sand production in hydrocarbon reservoirs imposes considerable cost on oil companies every year. That's over a several million dollars a year in Iran. The main goal of this thesis is the evaluation of pore pressure and stresses impact on volumetric rate of sand production. This research describes the physical and hydraulic properties of porous stone's. Sand production prediction models are introduced and described. The erosion model of rock is derived, Erosion model described by an erosion equation that developed by a code in UMESHMOTION subroutine. To simulate three-dimensional erosion model in ABAQUS, UMESHMOTION subroutine was linked to arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) domain of the model that prone to erosion to simulate 3D erosion and ablation of materials. An experimental model was chosen to compare with ABAQUS simulation results. Different pore pressures and mechanical In situ stresses are applied and the sand production is calculated and compared with available experimental data. The results show that increase on pore pressure and in situ stresses leads to increase in volumetric rate of sand production. The model was simulated with three different rock strengths and the results show decrease in sand production with increase on rock strength. A different erosion model was chosen and a 3D wellbore model?s of Ahwaz Bangestan wellbore was used to simulate sand production. Wellbore model was simulated with different in situ stresses and the results are reported. Keywords: Sand Production, Erosion Model, Porous Media, In Situ stress, ABAQUS, UMESHMOTION
