mud pump maintenance inc free sample

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The 2,200-hp mud pump for offshore applications is a single-acting reciprocating triplex mud pump designed for high fluid flow rates, even at low operating speeds, and with a long stroke design. These features reduce the number of load reversals in critical components and increase the life of fluid end parts.

The pump’s critical components are strategically placed to make maintenance and inspection far easier and safer. The two-piece, quick-release piston rod lets you remove the piston without disturbing the liner, minimizing downtime when you’re replacing fluid parts.

Many things go into getting the most life out of your mud pump and its components — all important to extend the usage of this vital piece of equipment on an HDD jobsite. Some of the most important key points are covered below.

The most important thing you can do is service your pump, per the manufacturer’s requirements. We get plenty of pumps in the shop for service work that look like they have been abused for years without having basic maintenance,  such as regular oil changes. You wouldn’t dream of treating your personal vehicle like that, so why would you treat your pump like that.

Check the oil daily and change the oil regularly. If you find water or drilling mud contamination in the oil, change the oil as soon as possible. Failure to do so will most likely leave you a substantial bill to rebuild the gear end, which could have been avoided if proper maintenance procedures would have been followed. Water in the oil does not allow the oil to perform correctly, which will burn up your gear end. Drilling mud in your gear end will act as a lapping compound and will wear out all of the bearing surfaces in your pump. Either way it will be costly. The main reasons for having water or drilling mud in the gear end of your pump is because your pony rod packing is failing and/or you have let your liners and pistons get severely worn. Indication of this is fluid that should be contained inside the fluid end of your pump is now moving past your piston and spraying into the cradle of the pump, which forces its way past the pony rod packing. Pony rod packing is meant to keep the oil in the gear end and the liner wash fluid out of the gear end. Even with brand new packing, you can have water or drilling fluid enter the gear end if it is sprayed with sufficient force, because a piston or liner is worn out.

There is also usually a valve on the inlet of the spray bar. This valve should be closed enough so that liner wash fluid does not spray all over the top of the pump and other components.

Liner wash fluid can be comprised of different fluids, but we recommend just using clean water. In extremely cold conditions, you can use RV antifreeze. The liner wash or rod wash system is usually a closed loop type of system, consisting of a tank, a small pump and a spray bar. The pump will move fluid from the tank through the spray bar, and onto the inside of the liner to cool the liner, preventing scorching. The fluid will then collect in the bottom of the cradle of the pump and drain back down into the collection tank below the cradle and repeat the cycle. It is important to have clean fluid no matter what fluid you use. If your liners are leaking and the tank is full of drilling fluid, you will not cool the liners properly — which will just make the situation worse. There is also usually a valve on the inlet of the spray bar. This valve should be closed enough so that liner wash fluid does not spray all over the top of the pump and other components. Ensure that the water is spraying inside the liner and that any overspray is not traveling out of the pump onto the ground or onto the pony rod packing where it could be pulled into the gear end. If the fluid is spraying out of the cradle area and falling onto the ground, it won’t be long before your liner wash tank is empty. It only takes a minute without the cooling fluid being sprayed before the liners become scorched. You will then need to replace the pistons and liners, which is an avoidable costly repair. Make a point to check the liner wash fluid level several times a day.

Drilling fluid — whether pumping drilling mud, straight water or some combination of fluid — needs to be clean. Clean meaning free of solids. If you are recycling your fluid, make sure you are using a quality mud recycling system and check the solids content often throughout the day to make sure the system is doing its job. A quality mud system being run correctly should be able to keep your solids content down to one quarter of 1 percent or lower. When filling your mud recycling system, be sure to screen the fluid coming into the tanks. If it is a mud recycling system, simply make sure the fluid is going over the scalping shaker with screens in the shaker. If using some other type of tank, use an inline filter or some other method of filtering. Pumping out of creeks, rivers, lakes and ponds can introduce plenty of solids into your tanks if you are not filtering this fluid. When obtaining water out of a fire hydrant, there can be a lot of sand in the line, so don’t assume it’s clean and ensure it’s filtered before use.

Cavitation is a whole other detailed discussion, but all triplex pumps have a minimum amount of suction pressure that is required to run properly. Make sure this suction pressure is maintained at all times or your pump may cavitate. If you run a pump that is cavitating, it will shorten the life of all fluid end expendables and, in severe cases, can lead to gear end and fluid end destruction. If the pump is experiencing cavitation issues, the problem must be identified and corrected immediately.

The long and the short of it is to use clean drilling fluid and you will extend the life of your pumps expendables and downhole tooling, and keep up with your maintenance on the gear end of your pump. Avoid pump cavitation at all times. Taking a few minutes a day to inspect and maintain your pump can save you downtime and costly repair bills.

Specifically designed for drilling companies and others in the oil and gas industry, the easy to use drilling rig inspections app makes it easy to log information about the drill rigs, including details about the drill rigs operators, miles logged and well numbers. The inspection form app covers everything from the mud pump areas and mud mixing area to the mud tanks and pits, making it easy to identify areas where preventative maintenance is needed. The drilling rig equipment checklist also covers health and safety issues, including the availability of PPE equipment, emergency response and preparedness processes, and other critical elements of the drilling process and drill press equipment.

If you run a mud rig, you have probably figured out that the mud pump is the heart of the rig. Without it, drilling stops. Keeping your pump in good shape is key to productivity. There are some tricks I have learned over the years to keeping a pump running well.

First, you need a baseline to know how well your pump is doing. When it’s freshly rebuilt, it will be at the top efficiency. An easy way to establish this efficiency is to pump through an orifice at a known rate with a known fluid. When I rig up, I hook my water truck to my pump and pump through my mixing hopper at idle. My hopper has a ½-inch nozzle in it, so at idle I see about 80 psi on the pump when it’s fresh. Since I’m pumping clear water at a known rate, I do this on every job.

As time goes on and I drill more hole, and the pump wears, I start seeing a decrease in my initial pressure — 75, then 70, then 65, etc. This tells me I better order parts. Funny thing is, I don’t usually notice it when drilling. After all, I am running it a lot faster, and it’s hard to tell the difference in a few gallons a minute until it really goes south. This method has saved me quite a bit on parts over the years. When the swabs wear they start to leak. This bypass pushes mud around the swab, against the liners, greatly accelerating wear. By changing the swab at the first sign of bypass, I am able to get at least three sets of swabs before I have to change liners. This saves money.

Before I figured this out, I would sometimes have to run swabs to complete failure. (I was just a hand then, so it wasn’t my rig.) When I tore the pump down to put in swabs, lo-and-behold, the liners were cut so badly that they had to be changed too. That is false economy. Clean mud helps too. A desander will pay for itself in pump parts quicker than you think, and make a better hole to boot. Pump rods and packing last longer if they are washed and lubricated. In the oilfield, we use a petroleum-based lube, but that it not a good idea in the water well business. I generally use water and dish soap. Sometimes it tends to foam too much, so I add a few tablets of an over the counter, anti-gas product, like Di-Gel or Gas-Ex, to cut the foaming.

Maintenance on the gear end of your pump is important, too. Maintenance is WAY cheaper than repair. The first, and most important, thing is clean oil. On a duplex pump, there is a packing gland called an oil-stop on the gear end of the rod. This is often overlooked because the pump pumps just as well with a bad oil-stop. But as soon as the fluid end packing starts leaking, it pumps mud and abrasive sand into the gear end. This is a recipe for disaster. Eventually, all gear ends start knocking. The driller should notice this, and start planning. A lot of times, a driller will change the oil and go to a higher viscosity oil, thinking this will help cushion the knock. Wrong. Most smaller duplex pumps are splash lubricated. Thicker oil does not splash as well, and actually starves the bearings of lubrication and accelerates wear. I use 85W90 in my pumps. A thicker 90W140 weight wears them out a lot quicker. You can improve the “climbing” ability of the oil with an additive, like Lucas, if you want. That seems to help.

Outside the pump, but still an important part of the system, is the pop-off, or pressure relief valve. When you plug the bit, or your brother-in-law closes the discharge valve on a running pump, something has to give. Without a good, tested pop-off, the part that fails will be hard to fix, expensive and probably hurt somebody. Pop-off valve are easily overlooked. If you pump cement through your rig pump, it should be a standard part of the cleanup procedure. Remove the shear pin and wash through the valve. In the old days, these valves were made to use a common nail as the shear pin, but now nails come in so many grades that they are no longer a reliable tool. Rated shear pins are available for this. In no case should you ever run an Allen wrench! They are hardened steel and will hurt somebody or destroy your pump.

One last thing that helps pump maintenance is a good pulsation dampener. It should be close to the pump discharge, properly sized and drained after every job. Bet you never thought of that one. If your pump discharge goes straight to the standpipe, when you finish the job your standpipe is still full of fluid. Eventually the pulsation dampener will water-log and become useless. This is hard on the gear end of the pump. Open a valve that drains it at the end of every job. It’ll make your pump run smoother and longer.

As usual, winter — or the slow season — is the time most drillers take the time to maintain their equipment in order to get ready for the peak season. One of the main parts that usually needs attention is the mud pump. Sometimes, it is just a set of swabs to bring it up to snuff, but often, tearing it down and inspecting the parts may reveal that other things need attention. For instance, liners. I can usually run three sets of swabs before it is time to change the liner. New liners and swabs last a good long time. The second set of swabs lasts less, and by the time you put in your third set of swabs, it’s time to order new liners. Probably rods too. It’s not always necessary to change pistons when you change swabs. Sometimes just the rubber needs to be changed, saving money. How do you tell? There is a small groove around the outside of the piston. As it wears, the groove will disappear and it’s time for a new piston.

The wear groove on a piston can be a good indicator of the general health of your pump. If the wear is pretty even all around, chances are the pump is in pretty good shape. But if you see wear on one side only, that is a clue to dig deeper. Uneven wear is a sign that the rods are not stroking at the exact angle that they were designed to, which is parallel to the liner. So, it’s time to look at the gear end. Or as some folks call it, “the expensive end.”

The wear groove on a piston can be a good indicator of the general health of your pump. If the wear is pretty even all around, chances are the pump is in pretty good shape. But if you see wear on one side only, that is a clue to dig deeper.

After you get the cover off the gear end, the first thing to look at will be the oil. It needs to be fairly clean, with no drill mud in it. Also look for metal. Some brass is to be expected, but if you put a magnet in the oil and come back later and it has more than a little metal on it, it gets more serious. The brass in the big end of the connecting rod is a wearable part. It is made to be replaced at intervals — usually years. The most common source of metal is from the bull and pinion gears. They transmit the power to the mud. If you look at the pinion gear closely, you will find that it wears faster than the bull gear. This is for two reasons. First, it is at the top of the pump and may not receive adequate lubrication. The second reason is wear. All the teeth on both the bull and pinion gears receive the same amount of wear, but the bull gear has many more teeth to spread the wear. That is why, with a well maintained pump, the bull gear will outlast the pinion gear three, four or even five times. Pinion gears aren’t too expensive and are fairly easy to change.

This process is fairly straightforward machine work, but over the years, I have discovered a trick that will bring a rebuild up to “better than new.” When you tear a pump down, did you ever notice that there is about 1-inch of liner on each end that has no wear? This is because the swab never gets to it. If it has wear closer to one end than the other, your rods are out of adjustment. The trick is to offset grind the journals. I usually offset mine about ¼-inch. This gives me a ½-inch increase in the stroke without weakening the gear end. This turns a 5x6 pump into a 5½x6 pump. More fluid equals better holes. I adjust the rods to the right length to keep from running out the end of the liner, and enjoy the benefits.

Other than age, the problem I have seen with journal wear is improper lubrication. Smaller pumps rely on splash lubrication. This means that as the crank strokes, the rods pick up oil and it lubricates the crank journals. If your gear end is full of drill mud due to bad packing, it’s going to eat your pump. If the oil is clean, but still shows crank wear, you need to look at the oil you are using.

Oil that is too thick will not be very well picked up and won’t find its way into the oil holes in the brass to lubricate the journals. I’ve seen drillers that, when their pump starts knocking, they switch to a heavier weight oil. This actually makes the problem worse. In my experience, factory specified gear end oil is designed for warmer climates. As you move north, it needs to be lighter to do its job. Several drillers I know in the Northern Tier and Canada run 30 weight in their pumps. In Georgia, I run 40W90. Seems to work well.

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A clean car not only makes for a happy driver, it helps the car run better, too. This is probably the simplest car maintenance advice, but it"s easily overlooked. With how busy life gets, car owners often don"t make time to clean out and wash a car. Here"s why you should be nice to your car.

Another way to keep your vehicle performing at its best is to simply take it easy while driving. This may seem like a silly tip, but it"s true. Similarly to the human body, pushing your vehicle hard can take a toll over time. Taking off quickly or applying the brakes suddenly increases premature wear and tear. Jerking around on the steering wheel can also cause damage over time. By driving smart and safe, you can keep your car happy and running in better shape for longer.