Premium standalone sand screens must limit sand production while preserving productivity, yet most erosion- and plugging-centred studies do not quantify how a stabilised filter-bed transfers hydraulic loading into stresses on woven wires. This study quantifies sustained normal and shear loading on a plain-weave standalone screen beneath stabilised sand filter-beds using an immersed boundary computational fluid dynamics-discrete element framework under increasing imposed pressure drop. Screen-surface stresses were evaluated over the loaded screen area for the whole screen and for interior and perimeter reporting zones using area-time-weighted distributions. The results show a clear monotonic strengthening of the stabilised loading state as pressure drop increased. Typical loading rose in both the normal and shear components, with the normal component remaining dominant throughout. The loaded-area fraction increased only modestly, whereas the mean stress over the loaded area increased much more strongly. This indicates that higher pressure drop amplified stress intensity within already engaged regions more than it expanded the area carrying load. The upper tail of the stress distribution also strengthened, which shows that increasing pressure drop intensified not only the typical loading state but also the most severe loading regime. Hotspot maps further showed persistent wire-scale organisation within each stabilised window, together with perimeter-associated amplification in the normal upper tail under the present configuration. These findings provide mechanics-based loading descriptors that can support screen qualification procedures and operating-envelope assessment under stabilised filter-bed loading.

Understanding fluid-particle interactions is critical in petroleum engineering, particularly for controlling drilling fluid performance and mitigating fluid loss. Numerical methods, such as the coupled computational fluid dynamics discrete element method, enable a detailed investigation of these interactions without relying on extensive experimental testing. Traditional particle-sizing guidelines, including empirical bridging rules, provide only partial insights into the pore-scale mechanisms governing filter cake formation and permeability evolution. In contrast, numerical modelling directly resolves how the particle size distribution and solid concentration influence the filter cake structure and flow behavior. This study employed a coupled numerical simulation framework to examine filter cake formation for drilling fluids containing unimodal and bimodal particle size distributions across a range of solid concentrations. The key descriptors analyzed included the filtration rate, filter cake porosity, permeability, and pore size distribution. The results show that bimodal particle mixtures exhibit a concentration-dependent transition in permeability behavior. At lower solid loadings, bimodal systems maintain substantially higher permeability than unimodal systems because of the persistence of large, connected pore pathways formed by coarse particles. As the solid concentration increases, finer particles progressively infiltrate and occlude these pathways, leading to a marked permeability reduction and convergence toward unimodal behavior. Pore-size distribution analysis revealed that permeability is governed primarily by the connectivity and continuity of large pore throats rather than by bulk porosity. These findings demonstrate that bimodal distributions require sufficient fine content to achieve effective fluid loss control, providing pore-scale numerical guidance for optimizing drilling-fluid particle-size selection strategies.