Passive Acoustic Tools Aid Analysis of Sand

Wells with sand-control measures may still exhibit the onset of sanding during production, often because of isolated damage to individual screen sections. Positive identification of sand-production location allows targeted mitigation while retaining as much hydrocarbon flow as possible. The complete paper discusses novel acoustic techniques used to identify productive zones and areas of sand production in a well with a sanding event.

Most modern tools will perform one or two fast Fourier transforms per second, but the tool design presented in the paper has a very fast sampling rate and completes 220 transforms per second. This allows the output frequency information to be further sampled in statistically meaningful ways to provide three additional noise parameters.