Primary Investigation of Ilmenite Dosage Effect on the Water-Based Drilling Fluid Properties

A high-density mud is required for deep drilling operations to keep formation pressure under control and avoid the kick. The high-density mud showed several challenges including sagging issues, undesirable rheology parameters, and higher possibility of inducing formation damage. Ilmenite is a weighting material that is used to increase the density of the drilling fluid. The effect of ilmenite dosage on the density of drilling fluid, rheological parameters, filtration, and filter cake qualities was explored in this study. Three different models were used to match the rheological properties including the Bingham model, the power-law model, and the Herschel–Bulkley model. The results showed that the prepared drilling mud density was correlated exactly with the amount of ilmenite added to the formulation. Similarly, the viscosity parameters were increased as ilmenite dosage increased. Even so, the results show that the rheological behavior seems to exhibit perfect matching using the three models, Herschel–Bulkley model was showing the highest accuracy compared to the other investigated models. Notably, the filtration behavior was dominated greatly by ilmenite dosage. The filtration volume and filter cake increased drastically as the ilmenite concentration increased. Correspondingly, the filter cake permeability was increased as the ilmenite concentration increased. Meanwhile, the dense packing of ilmenite particles at high concentrations produced lower filter cake porosity. Correlations were found with excellent accuracy between the ilmenite dosage and the filtration volume and filter cake properties.