Well intervention

Thermal Effects on Subsea-Wellhead Fatigue During Workover Operations

Intervention and workover operations can significantly affect the structural integrity and fatigue life of subsea-wellhead systems. Methodologies for wellhead-fatigue analysis have improved, but have yet to account for thermal effects along the well. This study analyzes those thermal effects.

Gradient heat inside geologic material
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Intervention and workover operations can significantly affect the structural integrity of subsea-wellhead systems with regard to their fatigue life. The increasing frequency of these operations has called for a renewed focus on the fatigue capacity of subsea wells, which has greatly improved the overall methodology used for wellhead-fatigue analysis. However, thermal effects along the well have yet to be incorporated. This paper analyzes wellhead-fatigue damage during a workover operation considering the thermal effects.

Methodology

The goal of the present study is to investigate the effects of the temperature variation along the well on wellhead-fatigue-damage rates by incorporating the temperature profiles of casing strings and cement into the fatigue-damage assessment of a particular wellhead system during a workover operation.

In this study, a decoupled approach is proposed.

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