The exploitation efficiency of natural gas hydrate is highly affected by sand production. In this paper, hydrocyclone purification separator was designed. A combination of single factor with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) was used to optimize the structure parameters. The performance of optimized hydrocyclone was also investigated. It shows that the sand separation efficiency increases from 90.4% to 98.7%, and the natural gas hydrate separation efficiency increases from 89.5% to 97.8%. Furthermore, the cut size of sand and natural gas hydrate are as low as 3 and 2 µm, respectively, and separation efficiency remains above 80% under inlet parameters. It can provide some reference for the design and manufacture of the in situ purification separator for gas hydrate mixture slurry.

The inserted sealing tool is a critical downhole implement that is used to balance the downhole pressure in multistage fracturing operations and prevent fracturing fluid from overflow and/or backward flow. The sealing ring of an inserted sealing tool plays an important role in downhole sealing since a sealing failure would ail the fracturing operation. In order to improve the sealing performance and reduce the potential fracturing failures, this research aims to investigate the influence of V-shaped sealing ring geometries on sealing performance. Constitutive experiments of rubber materials were carried out and the parameters of the constitutive relationship of rubber materials were obtained. A two-dimensional axisymmetric model considering the sealing ring has been established and influences are investigated with considerations of various system parameters and operating conditions. It is found that the stresses concentrated at the shoulder and inner vertex of the sealing ring have direct impact on the damage of the sealing rings under operational conditions. Moreover, the sealing interference, among several other factors, greatly affects the life of the sealing ring. A new design of the sealing ring is suggested with optimized geometric parameters. Its geometric parameters are the edge height of 5 mm, the vertex angle of 90°–100°, and the interference of 0.1 mm, which show a better performance and prolonged operation life of the sealing ring.

The application of a hydrocyclone to recycle NGH and desand during NGH exploitation is a novel idea. The flow field and performance of this hydrocyclone is in the frontier of the research in this field and is unclear so far. This research aimed to reveal the flow field characteristics and performance of NGH downhole hydrocyclones. In this paper, flow field, solid phase particle volume distribution and separation efficiency were investigated according to the two objectives of NGH recovery efficiency and sand removal efficiency with different inlet velocities by computational fluid simulations (CFD)-FLUENT software. The results show that the short circuit flow contributed to the recovery of NGH. Axial velocity is a decisive factor in balancing the two objectives of NGH recovery efficiency and sand removal efficiency. In addition, the same as those in traditional hydrocyclones, the static pressure, tangential velocity and turbulence intensity play key roles in separation performance, hydrocyclone performance can be improved by increasing the inlet velocity. On the other hand, most separation efficiencies were greater than 80%, when the particle size was larger than 15 µm, and the differential pressure was less than 0.6 MPa. Therefore, all the above results confirm that hydrocyclone has good performance in NGH exploitation, and the basis of its structural design and optimization are provided.

Water jet technology is a key technology in the marine natural gas hydrate (NGH) solid fluidization mining method. As an important parameter in water jet breaking NGH sediments technology, the critical breaking velocity of NGH sediments is unknown. In the present research, an orthogonal design experiment is carried out to study the critical velocity of NGH breakage by water jet, using frozen soil and sand as experimental samples. First, the time it takes to reach maximum NGH breaking depth is determined. Then, ultimate breaking distance is studied with respect to the NGH saturation, jet pressure, and nozzle diameter. Following that, the variation of critical velocity with NGH saturation is analyzed. Eventually, a formula to calculate the critical velocity for marine NGH breakage by water jet process is established, and the undetermined coefficient (η) in the formula is calibrated with the experiment data. The results show that the ultimate breaking distance is mostly achieved within 63 s. The three experimental factors in order of the effect on the ultimate breaking depth (from high to low) are NGH saturation, jet pressure, and nozzle diameter. The critical velocities for marine NGH breakage corresponding to the NGH saturations of 20%, 40,%, 6%, and 80% are 5.71 m/s, 7.14 m/s, 9.60 m/s, and 10.85 m/s, respectively. The undetermined coefficient η in critical velocity formula is 1.44 m/s.