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There are a lot of reports of formation induced damage of wells world-wide. Despite extensive literature on the subject, formation induced damage is not a standardized part of well design. One reason may be that the associated fundamental mechanism is not yet fully understood, which makes it difficult to implement in design rules. As a step towards practical design, this paper aims at improving the understanding of characteristic mechanisms of well formation interaction by analytical solutions to two simple cases. The first case considered is a vertical well in a compacting reservoir and is solved by elasticity theory. An elastic length parameter is derived, which is function of the axial stiffness of well and shear stiffness of formation. The well is then shown to follow the deformation of the compacting reservoir, with exception of a transient zone around the boundary to the overburden. The elastic length determines the size of this transient zone. Through the transient zone, the axial force reduces towards zero in the overburden. A learning is that in many cases it is sufficient to instrument the well casing or liner to measure reservoir compaction. The result also supports the finding that the high number of well damage in the deep overburden is due to another mechanism: shear deformation or slip of a weak plane crossing the well. This second case is also studied analytically yet based on plasticity theory. Input parameters to this model are shear and moment capacity of the well, shear strength of the formation and a load displacement characteristic of the formation. A general finding is that during such slip, the well is normally not able to resist, and it fails by exceeding the moment capacity at a distance from the shear plane. The final and third case studied is ovalization of the cross section of a horizontal well due to pressure from the formation. This is a phenomenon occurring in salt and weak shale. It is a more complex interaction problem and a numerical simulation by finite element is used to solve it. A workflow is developed for an uncemented part of a horizontal well in a shale formation. Input parameters are in-situ stress, pore pressure and stiffness and strength of well and formation. Since the vertical stress is larger than the horizontal, the shear mobilization is largest to the side of the casing and shear failure starts there, initiating plastic deformation until contact and start of ovalization by reducing the lateral diameter of the well. By reduction of the mud pressure in the outer annulus, the contact area grows. Finally, the structural capacity of an ovalized casing with full formation contact is calculated. The formation is found to have some supporting effect and the resulting capacity is higher than the capacity of an ovalized casing without formation support.

The research work presented in this paper aims at developing a constitutive model which is capable to determine resistance factor for given penetrometer testing data in clays. The NGI-ADPSoft constitutive model that accounts for anisotropic shear strength and post peak strain softening, is extended with strain rate effect for this purpose. A series of large deformation finite element analyses of different penetrometers in clays including T-bar, ball and cone tests are performed. Some initial results from these analyses are discussed in this paper.

International audience; The classic models describing the hygric mass transfers inside porous materials seem unsuitable in the case of bio-based materials. They are based on the assumption of instantaneous local equilibrium between relative humidity and water content [1]. These two parameters evolve according to the diffusive fluxes following the sorption isotherms. This study shows that it leads to predict much shorter times of stabilization than those experimentally obtained. A new approach is presented here, it frees from the local instantaneous equilibrium introducing a local kinetics to describe the transformation of water from vapor state to liquid state and vice versa. The local kinetics of sorption is coupled with the well-known hysteresis phenomenon. It is adjusted from bibliographic data [2] giving mass evolution of three hemp concretes under adsorption / desorption conditions. 1D cylindrical simulations allows an excellent fitting on the experiments. Finally, a semi-empirical model is proposed, allowing to determine the kinetics parameters more easily. The effect of the local kinetics model on the hygrothermal transfers occurring through a bio-based wall is then studied.