Development of New Rheological Models for Class G Cement with Nanoclay as an Additive Using Machine Learning Techniques

The rheology of the oil well cement plays a pivotal role in the cement placement. Accurate prediction of cement rheological parameters helps to monitor the durability and pumpability of the cement slurry. In this study, an artificial neural network is used to develop different models for the prediction of various rheological parameters such as shear stress, apparent viscosity, plastic viscosity, and yield point of a class G cement slurry with nanoclay as an additive. An extensive experimental study was conducted to generate enough data set for the training of artificial intelligence models. The class G oil well cement slurries were prepared by fixing the water-cement ratio to 0.44 and adding organically modified nanoclays as a strength enhancer. The rheological properties of the oil well cement slurries were investigated at a wide range of temperatures (37 ≤ T ≤ 90 °C) and shear rates (5 ≤ γ≤ 500 s-1). Experimental data generated were used for the training of feed-forward neural networks. The predicted values of the rheological properties from the trained model showed a good agreement when compared with the experimental values. The average absolute percentage error was less than 5% in both training and validation phases of modeling. A trend analysis was carried out to ensure that the proposed models can define the underlying physics. From the validation and the trend analysis, it was found that the new models can be used to predict cement rheological properties within the range of data set on which the models were trained. The proposed models are independent of laboratory-dependent variables and can give quick and real-time values of the rheological parameters.