mud pump flow loop made in china

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Mud Pump Pulsation Dampener is usually installed on the discharge line to reduce the fluctuation of pressure and displacement of the drilling mud pump.

Mud Pump Pulsation Dampener is a pneumatic device built into the outflow line of each UUD pump to dampen the pressure fluctuations resulting from the action of the pump. Although presented as a surge tank, this device is really a device that can be tuned to greatly diminish the output pulsations transmitted downstream from the mud pump. Unfortunately, the effectiveness of the pulsation dampener is a function of both output pump pressure and frequency of the pump pulsations.

When two (or more) pumps are arranged in serial their resulting pump performance curve is obtained by adding theirheads at the same flow rate as indicated in the figure below.

Centrifugal pumps in series are used to overcome larger system head loss than one pump can handle alone. for two identical pumps in series the head will be twice the head of a single pump at the same flow rate - as indicated with point 2.

With a constant flowrate the combined head moves from 1 to 2 - BUTin practice the combined head and flow rate moves along the system curve to point 3. point 3 is where the system operates with both pumps running

When two or more pumps are arranged in parallel their resulting performance curve is obtained by adding the pumps flow rates at the same head as indicated in the figure below.

Centrifugal pumps in parallel are used to overcome larger volume flows than one pump can handle alone. for two identical pumps in parallel and the head kept constant - the flow rate doubles compared to a single pump as indicated with point 2

Note! In practice the combined head and volume flow moves along the system curve as indicated from 1 to 3. point 3 is where the system operates with both pumps running

In practice, if one of the pumps in parallel or series stops, the operation point moves along the system resistance curve from point 3 to point 1 - the head and flow rate are decreased.

The piston is one of the parts that most easily become worn out and experience failure in mud pumps for well drilling. By imitating the body surface morphology of the dung beetle, this paper proposed a new type (BW-160) of mud pump piston that had a dimpled shape in the regular layout on the piston leather cup surface and carried out a performance test on the self-built test rig. Firstly, the influence of different dimple diameters on the service life of the piston was analyzed. Secondly, the analysis of the influence of the dimple central included angle on the service life of the piston under the same dimple area density was obtained. Thirdly, the wear of the new type of piston under the same wear time was analyzed. The experimental results indicated that the service life of the piston with dimples on the surface was longer than that of L-Standard pistons, and the maximum increase in the value of service life was 92.06%. Finally, the Workbench module of the software ANSYS was used to discuss the wear-resisting mechanism of the new type of piston.

The mud pump is the “heart” of the drilling system [1]. It has been found that about 80% of mud pump failures are caused by piston wear. Wear is the primary cause of mud pump piston failure, and improving the wear-resisting performance of the piston-cylinder friction pair has become the key factor to improve the service life of piston.

Most of the researchers mainly improve the service life of piston through structural design, shape selection, and material usage [1, 2]. However, the structure of mud pump piston has been essentially fixed. The service life of piston is improved by increasing piston parts and changing the structures of the pistons. However, the methods have many disadvantages, for example, complicating the entire structure, making piston installation and change difficult, increasing production and processing costs, and so on. All piston leather cup lips use rubber materials, and the material of the root part of the piston leather cup is nylon or fabric; many factors restrict piston service life by changing piston materials [3]. Improving the component wear resistance through surface texturing has been extensively applied in engineering. Under multiple lubricating conditions, Etsion has studied the wear performance of the laser surface texturing of end face seal and reciprocating automotive components [4–6]. Ren et al. have researched the surface functional structure from the biomimetic perspective for many years and pointed out that a nonsmooth surface structure could improve the wear resistance property of a friction pair [7, 8]. Our group has investigated the service life and wear resistance of the striped mud pump piston, and the optimal structure parameters of the bionic strip piston have improved piston service life by 81.5% [9]. Wu et al. have exploited an internal combustion engine piston skirt with a dimpled surface, and the bionic piston has showed a 90% decrease in the average wear mass loss in contrast with the standard piston [10]. Gao et al. have developed bionic drills using bionic nonsmooth theory. Compared with the ordinary drills, the bionic drills have showed a 44% increase in drilling rate and a 74% improvement in service life [11]. The present researches indicate that microstructures, like superficial dimples and stripes, contribute to constituting dynamic pressure to improve the surface load-carrying capacity and the wear resistance of the friction pair [12–21].

In nature, insects have developed the excellent wear-resistant property in the span of billions of years. For instance, the partial body surface of the dung beetle shows an irregularly dimpled textured surface with the excellent wear-resistant property that is conducive to its living environment [7, 8, 22]. The dung beetle, which is constantly active in the soil, shows a body surface dimple structure that offers superior drag reduction. These dimples effectively reduce the contact area between the body surface and the soil. Moreover, the friction force is reduced. Therefore, the dung beetle with the nonsmooth structure provides the inspiration to design the bionic mud pump piston. This paper proposed a new type of piston with dimpled morphology on its surface and conducted a comparative and experimental study of different surface dimpled shapes, thus opening up a new potential to improve the service life of the mud pump piston.

A closed-loop circulatory system was used in the test rig, which was built according to the national standard with specific test requirements. The test rig consisted of triplex single-acting mud pump, mud tank, in-and-out pipeline, reducer valve, flow meter, pressure gauge, and its principle, as shown in Figure 1. Both the pressure and working stroke of the BW-160 mud pump are smaller than those of the large-scale mud pump, but their operating principles, structures, and working processes are identical. Therefore, the test selected a relatively small BW-160 triplex single-acting mud pump piston as a research object, and the test results and conclusion were applicable to large-scale mud pump pistons. The cylinder diameter, working stroke, reciprocating motion velocity of piston, maximum flow quantity, and working pressure of the BW-160 triplex single-acting mud pump were 70 mm, 70 mm, 130 times/min, 160 L/min, and 0.8–1.2 MPa, respectively.

The mud pump used in the test consisted of water, bentonite (meeting the API standard), and quartz sand with a diameter of 0.3–0.5 mm according to actual working conditions. The specific gravity of the prepared mud was 1.306, and its sediment concentration was 2.13%. Whether mud leakage existed at the venthole in the tail of the cylinder liner of the mud pump was taken as the standard of piston failure. Observation was made every other half an hour during the test process. It was judged that the piston in the cylinder failed when mud leaked continuously; its service life was recorded, and then it was replaced with the new test piston and cylinder liner. The BW-160 mud pump is a triplex single-acting mud pump. The wear test of three pistons could be simultaneously conducted.

The mud pump piston used in the test consisted of a steel core, leather cup, pressing plate, and clamp spring. The leather cup consisted of the lip part of polyurethane rubber and the root part of nylon; the outer diameter on the front end of the piston was 73 mm, and the outer diameter of the piston tail was 70 mm, as shown in Figure 2. We proceeded in two parts during the design of the dimpled layout pattern because the piston leather cup consisted of two parts whose materials were different. The dimples at the lip part of the leather cup adopted an isosceles triangle layout pattern, and the dimples at the root part were arranged at the central part of its axial length, as shown in Figure 3(a). Dimple diameter (D, D′), distance (L), depth (h), and central included angle (α) are shown in Figure 3. The dimples on the piston surface were processed by the CNC machining center. Since then, the residual debris inside the dimples was cleaned.

Table 1 shows that average service lives of L-Standard, L-D1, L-D2, and L-D3 were 54.67 h, 57.17 h, 76.83 h, and 87.83 h, respectively. Therefore, the mud pump pistons with dimples provide longer service life than the L-Standard piston. As the dimple diameter increases, the piston service life was improved, and the largest percentage increase of the service life was 60.65%. The service life of the L-D4 piston was about 81.17 h, which increased by 7.94% compared with that of the L-D2 piston, indicating that the piston with dimples at the leather cup root could improve piston service life.

Figure 4 illustrates the surface wear patterns of pistons with different dimple diameters in the service life test. Figures 4(a) and 4(a′) show wear patterns on the surface of the L-Standard piston. This figure shows that intensive scratches existed in parallel arrangement on the piston leather cup surface, enabling high-pressure mud to move along the scratches from one end of the piston to the other easily, which accelerated the abrasive wear failure with the abrasive particles of the piston. Figures 4(b), 4(b′), 4(c), 4(c′), 4(d), and 4(d′) show the wear patterns of the leather cup surfaces of L-D1, L-D2, and L-D3 pistons, respectively. Figures 4(b), 4(b′), 4(c), 4(c′), 4(d), and 4(d′) show that the scratches on the leather cup surface became shallower and sparser and the surface wear patterns improved more obviously as the dimple diameter increased. If the piston leather cup surface strength was not affected to an extent as the dimple diameter increased, the reduced wear zone near the dimple would become greater and greater, indicating that the existence of dimples changed the lubricating status of the leather cup surface, their influence on nearby dimpled parts was more obvious, and they played active roles in improving the service life of the piston.

Figure 5 displays the wear patterns of the leather cup root parts of the L-D4 and L-D2 test pistons. The wear patterns of the nylon root parts of the L-D4 pistons are fewer than those of the L-D2 pistons, as shown in Figure 5. When the leather cup squeezed out high-pressure mud as driven by the piston steel core, it experienced radial squeezing while experiencing axial wear. Therefore, the area with the most serious wear was the piston leather cup root part, and the friction force at the leather cup root was much greater than that at the other areas. The rapid wear at the root decreased the piston load-carrying capacity and then affected the service life of piston. The dimples at the piston leather cup root could reduce the wear of the piston leather cup root and improve the service life of piston.

Figure 6 shows the surface wear patterns of the L-S1 and L-S2 test pistons. In Figures 6(a) and 6(a′), the scratches on the piston leather cup surface became sparse and shallow in the dimpled area. Figures 6(b) and 6(b′) show that the wear was slight in the area close to the dimples. The farther the scratches were from the dimpled area, the denser and deeper the scratches would be. The L-S1 piston had a small dimple central included angle, which was arranged more closely on the piston surface. The lubricating effects of oil storage in each row of dimples were overlaid very well, which was equivalent to amplifying the effect of each row of dimples in Figure 6(b), making the wear on the whole piston leather cup surface slight, preventing the entry of high-pressure mud into the frictional interface, and lengthening the service life of piston.

During the operation of the mud pump piston, the outside surface of the piston leather cup comes in contact with the inner wall of the cylinder liner and simultaneously moves to push the mud. The lip part of the piston leather cup mainly participated in the piston wear and exerted a sealing effect, while the piston root part mainly exerted centralizing and transitional effects. In the mud discharge stroke, the lip part of the piston experienced a “centripetal effect,” and a gap was generated between the lip part and the cylinder liner. The greater the contact pressure between the lip part and cylinder liner of the piston was, the smaller the gap was, and the entry of high-pressure mud into the contact surface between the piston and cylinder liner was more difficult. The piston root easily experienced squeezing under high pressure, and the smaller the equivalent stress caused by the piston root was, the more difficult the squeezing to occur. Hence, the contact pressure at the lip part of the piston and the equivalent stress at the root were analyzed, and they would provide a theoretical basis for the piston wear-resisting mechanism. The ANSYS Workbench module was used to perform a comparative analysis between the contact pressure at the lip part and the equivalent stress at the root of the three kinds of pistons (i.e., L-Standard piston, L-S1 piston, and L-D1 piston). The service life of the L-S1 piston exhibited the best improvement effect, whereas that of the L-D1 piston demonstrated the worst improvement effect. The piston adopted a 1 mm hexahedral grid, and the grid nodes and elements are as shown in Table 4.

The lubricating oil on the mud pump piston surface could reduce the wear of piston and cylinder liner and improve the service life of pistons with the reciprocating movement. The lubricating oil would eventually run off and lose lubricating effect, which would result in piston wear. The finite element fluid dynamics software CFX was used to establish the fluid domain model of the dimpled and L-Standard pistons and analyze the lubricating state on the piston surface. The piston surface streamlines are shown in Figure 10. This figure shows that the lubricating fluid did not experience truncation or backflow phenomenon when passing the surface of the L-Standard piston. When the lubricating fluid flowed through the surface of the dimpled piston, it presented a noncontinuous process. Its flow velocity at the dimpled structure slowed down obviously because it was blocked by the dimpled structure.

Figure 11 shows the piston cross section streamline. This figure shows that the existence of dimples changed the distribution status of the lubricating flow fields on the contact surface between the piston and cylinder liner. The lubricating oil entered the dimpled structure in a large quantity, and the flow velocity slowed down. The dimpled structure on the piston surface enlarged the storage space of the lubricating oil and made it difficult for the lubricating oil inside the dimpled structure to be taken away by the cylinder liner to improve the lubricating conditions of the friction pair interface, reduce the frictional resistance between the piston and cylinder liner, reduce wear, and improve the piston service life.

When the piston moved in the cylinder liner, a small quantity of solid particles in mud entered gap of piston and cylinder liner and participated in abrasion. The dimpled structure on the piston surface could store some abrasive particles (as shown in Figure 6(a′)) during the piston wear process to prevent these particles from scratching the piston and cylinder liner and generating gullies, thus avoiding secondary damage to the piston and cylinder liner and improving the piston service life.

This paper presented a dimpled-shape mud pump piston; that is, the piston leather cup surface had a dimpled array morphology in regular arrangement. The experimental results can provide the basic data for design engineering of the mud pump piston with a long service life. The comparative analyses of service life and wear patterns for dimpled mud pump pistons and L-Standard pistons were conducted. The main results and conclusions were summarized as follows:(1)The service life of the mud pump piston with dimpled morphology on the surface improved in comparison with that of the L-Standard piston, and the service life increase percentages were from 4.57% to 92.06%.(2)The piston service life would increase with the dimple diameter under the same dimpled arrangement pattern, and the maximum increase in the value of service life was 60.65%.(3)The service life of the piston with dimples increased by 7.94% in comparison with that with none.(4)Under the same dimpled arrangement patterns and area densities, the tighter and closer the dimples were arranged on the piston surface, the longer the service life of piston was, and the maximum increase in the value of service life was 92.06%.(5)Under the same wear time, the wear of the dimpled piston slightly decreased in comparison with that of the L-Standard piston, and the minimum value of wear mass percentage was 3.83%.(6)The dimpled shape could not only change the stress state of the piston structure, improve piston wear resistance, and reduce root squeezing, but also increase oil storage space, improve lubricating conditions, and enable the accommodation of some abrasive particles. Furthermore, the dimpled shape was the key factor for the service life improvement of the mud pump piston.

Researchers have shown that mud pulse telemetry technologies have gained exploration and drilling application advantages by providing cost-effective real-time data transmission in closed-loop drilling operations. Given the inherited mud pulse operation difficulties, there have been numerous communication channel efforts to improve data rate speed and transmission distance in LWD operations. As discussed in “MPT systems signal impairments”, mud pulse signal pulse transmissions are subjected to mud pump noise signals, signal attenuation and dispersion, downhole random (electrical) noises, signal echoes and reflections, drillstring rock formation and gas effects, that demand complex surface signal detection and extraction processes. A number of enhanced signal processing techniques and methods to signal coding and decoding, data compression, noise cancellation and channel equalization have led to improved MPT performance in tests and field applications. This section discusses signal-processing techniques to minimize or eliminate signal impairments on mud pulse telemetry system.

At early stages of mud pulse telemetry applications, matched filter demonstrated the ability to detect mud pulse signals in the presence of simulated or real noise. Matched filter method eliminated the mud noise effects by calculating the self-correlation coefficients of received signal mixed with noise (Marsh et al. 1988). Sharp cutoff low-pass filter was proposed to remove mud pump high frequencies and improve surface signal detection. However, matched filter method was appropriate only for limited single frequency signal modulated by frequency-shift keying (FSK) with low transmission efficiency and could not work for frequency band signals modulated by phase shift keying (PSK) (Shen et al. 2013a).

In processing noise-contaminated mud pulse signals, longer vanishing moments are used, but takes longer time for wavelet transform. The main wavelet transform method challenges include effective selection of wavelet base, scale parameters and vanishing moment; the key determinants of signal correlation coefficients used to evaluate similarities between original and processed signals. Chen et al. (2010) researched on wavelet transform and de-noising technique to obtain mud pulse signals waveform shaping and signal extraction based on the pulse-code information processing to restore pulse signal and improve SNR. Simulated discrete wavelet transform showed effective de-noise technique, downhole signal was recovered and decoded with low error rate. Namuq et al. (2013) studied mud pulse signal detection and characterization technique of non-stationary continuous pressure pulses generated by the mud siren based on the continuous Morlet wavelet transformation. In this method, generated non-stationary sinusoidal pressure pulses with varying amplitudes and frequencies used ASK and FSK modulation schemes. Simulated wavelet technique showed appropriate results for dynamic signal characteristics analysis.

As discussed in “MPT mud pump noises”, the often overlap of the mud pulses frequency spectra with the mud pump noise frequency components adds complexity to mud pulse signal detection and extraction. Real-time monitoring requirement and the non-stationary frequency characteristics made the utilization of traditional noise filtering techniques very difficult (Brandon et al. 1999). The MPT operations practical problem contains spurious frequency peaks or outliers that the standard filter design cannot effectively eliminate without the possibility of destroying some data. Therefore, to separate noise components from signal components, new filtering algorithms are compulsory.

Early development Brandon et al. (1999) proposed adaptive compensation method that use non-linear digital gain and signal averaging in the reference channel to eliminate the noise components in the primary channel. In this method, synthesized mud pulse signal and mud pump noise were generated and tested to examine the real-time digital adaptive compensation applicability. However, the method was not successfully applied due to complex noise signals where the power and the phases of the pump noises are not the same.

Jianhui et al. (2007) researched the use of two-step filtering algorithms to eliminate mud pulse signal direct current (DC) noise components and attenuate the high frequency noises. In the study, the low-pass finite impulse response (FIR) filter design was used as the DC estimator to get a zero mean signal from the received pressure waveforms while the band-pass filter was used to eliminate out-of-band mud pump frequency components. This method used center-of-gravity technique to obtain mud pulse positions of downhole signal modulated by pulse positioning modulation (PPM) scheme. Later Zhao et al. (2009) used the average filtering algorithm to decay DC noise components and a windowed limited impulse response (FIR) algorithm deployed to filter high frequency noise. Yuan and Gong (2011) studied the use of directional difference filter and band-pass filter methods to remove noise on the continuous mud pulse differential binary phase shift keying (DBPSK) modulated downhole signal. In this technique, the directional difference filter was used to eliminate mud pump and reflection noise signals in time domain while band-pass filter isolated out-of-band noise frequencies in frequency domain.

Other researchers implemented adaptive FIR digital filter using least mean square (LMS) evaluation criterion to realize the filter performances to eliminate random noise frequencies and reconstruct mud pulse signals. This technique was adopted to reduce mud pump noise and improve surface received telemetry signal detection and reliability. However, the quality of reconstructed signal depends on the signal distortion factor, which relates to the filter step-size factor. Reasonably, chosen filter step-size factor reduces the signal distortion quality. Li and Reckmann (2009) research used the reference signal fundamental frequencies and simulated mud pump harmonic frequencies passed through the LMS filter design to adaptively track pump noises. This method reduced the pump noise signals by subtracting the pump noise approximation from the received telemetry signal. Shen et al. (2013a) studied the impacts of filter step-size on signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) distortions. The study used the LMS control algorithm to adjust the adaptive filter weight coefficients on mud pulse signal modulated by differential phase shift keying (DPSK). In this technique, the same filter step-size factor numerical calculations showed that the distortion factor of reconstructed mud pressure QPSK signal is smaller than that of the mud pressure DPSK signal.

Study on electromagnetic LWD receiver’s ability to extract weak signals from large amounts of well site noise using the adaptive LMS iterative algorithm was done by (Liu 2016). Though the method is complex and not straightforward to implement, successive LMS adaptive iterations produced the LMS filter output that converges to an acceptable harmonic pump noise approximation. Researchers’ experimental and simulated results show that the modified LMS algorithm has faster convergence speed, smaller steady state and lower excess mean square error. Studies have shown that adaptive FIR LMS noise cancellation algorithm is a feasible effective technique to recover useful surface-decoded signal with reasonable information quantity and low error rate.

Different techniques which utilize two pressure sensors have been proposed to reduce or eliminate mud pump noises and recover downhole telemetry signals. During mud pressure signal generation, activated pulsar provides an uplink signal at the downhole location and the at least two sensor measurements are used to estimate the mud channel transfer function (Reckmann 2008). The telemetry signal and the first signal (pressure signal or flow rate signal) are used to activate the pulsar and provide an uplink signal at the downhole location; second signal received at the surface detectors is processed to estimate the telemetry signal; a third signal responsive to the uplink signal at a location near the downhole location is measured (Brackel 2016; Brooks 2015; Reckmann 2008, 2014). The filtering process uses the time delay between first and third signals to estimate the two signal cross-correlation (Reckmann 2014). In this method, the derived filter estimates the transfer function of the communication channel between the pressure sensor locations proximate to the mud pump noise source signals. The digital pump stroke is used to generate pump noise signal source at a sampling rate that is less than the selected receiver signal (Brackel 2016). This technique is complex as it is difficult to estimate accurately the phase difference required to give quantifiable time delay between the pump sensor and pressure sensor signals.

As mud pulse frequencies coincide with pump noise frequency in the MPT 1–20 Hz frequency operations, applications of narrow-band filter cannot effectively eliminate pump noises. Shao et al. (2017) proposed continuous mud pulse signal extraction method using dual sensor differential signal algorithm; the signal was modulated by the binary frequency-shift keying (BFSK). Based on opposite propagation direction between the downhole mud pulses and pump noises, analysis of signal convolution and Fourier transform theory signal processing methods can cancel pump noise signals using Eqs. 3 and 4. The extracted mud pulse telemetry signal in frequency domain is given by Eqs. 3 and 4 and its inverse Fourier transformation by Eq. 4. The method is feasible to solve the problem of signal extraction from pump noise,

These researches provide a novel mud pulse signal detection and extraction techniques submerged into mud pump noise, attenuation, reflections, and other noise signals as it moves through the drilling mud.

This series includes any of our end-suction centrifugal pumps combined with our high capacity, vacuum-assist,dry-priming system, capable of rapid, unattended priming and continuous repriming.Units are available for Solids Handling or Clear Liquid Service. Enclosed Silent Packages are available with DBA Ratings under 70 DBA@ 7 meters. Pumps are also available in a variety of different metallurgies.