mud pump drilling free sample

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.

Created specifically for drilling equipment inspectors and others in the oil and gas industry, the Oil Rig Mud Pump Inspection app allows you to easily document the status and safety of your oil rigs using just a mobile device. Quickly resolve any damage or needed maintenance with photos and GPS locations and sync to the cloud for easy access. The app is completely customizable to fit your inspection needs and works even without an internet signal.Try Template

I’ve run into several instances of insufficient suction stabilization on rigs where a “standpipe” is installed off the suction manifold. The thought behind this design was to create a gas-over-fluid column for the reciprocating pump and eliminate cavitation.

When the standpipe is installed on the suction manifold’s deadhead side, there’s little opportunity to get fluid into all the cylinders to prevent cavitation. Also, the reciprocating pump and charge pump are not isolated.

The gas over fluid internal systems has limitations too. The standpipe loses compression due to gas being consumed by the drilling fluid. In the absence of gas, the standpipe becomes virtually defunct because gravity (14.7 psi) is the only force driving the cylinders’ fluid. Also, gas is rarely replenished or charged in the standpipe.

The suction stabilizer’s compressible feature is designed to absorb the negative energies and promote smooth fluid flow. As a result, pump isolation is achieved between the charge pump and the reciprocating pump.

The isolation eliminates pump chatter, and because the reciprocating pump’s negative energies never reach the charge pump, the pump’s expendable life is extended.

Investing in suction stabilizers will ensure your pumps operate consistently and efficiently. They can also prevent most challenges related to pressure surges or pulsations in the most difficult piping environments.

Sigma Drilling Technologies’ Charge Free Suction Stabilizer is recommended for installation. If rigs have gas-charged cartridges installed in the suction stabilizers on the rig, another suggested upgrade is the Charge Free Conversion Kits.

Instead of using paper checklists when out in the field, drilling contractors and rig inspection services can generate a new inspection form from anywhere and the results are saved electronically.

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.

The drilling operations app was designed specifically for the mud pump area in the drill rig, and covers relevant safety topics, including drilling mud level, drilling equipment safety, pipe pressure, drilling process and more.

The oil and gas rig equipment app can be customized for different drilling rig locations. Once the drilling equipment and rig floor have been inspected, users can sign off on the results electronically.

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.

Centerline Manu-facturing introduces the CLM 7.5 x 10D hydraulic mud pump, a pump which utilizes common fluid end parts. Its advantages are said to be its flow capacity, rated pressure, size and weight. It is designed to pump 100 percent more rated flow than a standard 5x6 and up to 3.25 times the rated pressure. However, it only has a third of the weight and 77 percent of the length.

There are many different ways to drill a domestic water well. One is what we call the “mud rotary” method. Whether or not this is the desired and/or best method for drilling your well is something more fully explained in this brief summary.

One advantage of drilling with compressed air is that it can tell you when you have encountered groundwater and gives you an indication how much water the borehole is producing. When drilling with water using the mud rotary method, the driller must rely on his interpretation of the borehole cuttings and any changes he can observe in the recirculating fluid. Mud rotary drillers can also use borehole geophysical tools to interpret which zones might be productive enough for your water well.

The mud rotary well drilling method is considered a closed-loop system. That is, the mud is cleaned of its cuttings and then is recirculated back down the borehole. Referring to this drilling method as “mud” is a misnomer, but it is one that has stuck with the industry for many years and most people understand what the term actually means.

The water is carefully mixed with a product that should not be called mud because it is a highly refined and formulated clay product—bentonite. It is added, mixed, and carefully monitored throughout the well drilling process.

The purpose of using a bentonite additive to the water is to form a thin film on the walls of the borehole to seal it and prevent water losses while drilling. This film also helps support the borehole wall from sluffing or caving in because of the hydraulic pressure of the bentonite mixture pressing against it. The objective of the fluid mixture is to carry cuttings from the bottom of the borehole up to the surface, where they drop out or are filtered out of the fluid, so it can be pumped back down the borehole again.

When using the mud rotary method, the driller must have a sump, a tank, or a small pond to hold a few thousand gallons of recirculating fluid. If they can’t dig sumps or small ponds, they must have a mud processing piece of equipment that mechanically screens and removes the sands and gravels from the mixture. This device is called a “shale shaker.”

The driller does not want to pump fine sand through the pump and back down the borehole. To avoid that, the shale shaker uses vibrating screens of various sizes and desanding cones to drop the sand out of the fluid as it flows through the shaker—so that the fluid can be used again.

Before the well casing and screens are lowered into the borehole, the recirculating fluid is slowly thinned out by adding fresh water as the fluid no longer needs to support sand and gravel. The driller will typically circulate the drilling from the bottom up the borehole while adding clear water to thin down the viscosity or thickness of the fluid. Once the fluid is sufficiently thinned, the casing and screens are installed and the annular space is gravel packed.

Gravel pack installed between the borehole walls and the outside of the well casing acts like a filter to keep sand out and maintain the borehole walls over time. During gravel packing of the well, the thin layer of bentonite clay that kept the borehole wall from leaking drilling fluid water out of the recirculating system now keeps the formation water from entering the well.

Some drillers use compressed air to blow off the well, starting at the first screened interval and slowly working their way to the bottom—blowing off all the water standing above the drill pipe and allowing it to recover, and repeating this until the water blown from the well is free of sand and relatively clean. If after repeated cycles of airlift pumping and recovery the driller cannot find any sand in the water, it is time to install a well development pump.

Additional development of the well can be done with a development pump that may be of a higher capacity than what the final installation pump will be. Just as with cycles of airlift pumping of the well, the development pump will be cycled at different flow rates until the maximum capacity of the well can be determined. If the development pump can be operated briefly at a flow rate 50% greater than the permanent pump, the well should not pump sand.

Mud rotary well drillers for decades have found ways to make this particular system work to drill and construct domestic water wells. In some areas, it’s the ideal method to use because of the geologic formations there, while other areas of the country favor air rotary methods.

Some drilling rigs are equipped to drill using either method, so the contractor must make the decision as to which method works best in your area, for your well, and at your point in time.

To learn more about the difference between mud rotary drilling and air rotary drilling, click the video below. The video is part of our “NGWA: Industry Connected” YouTube series:

Gary Hix is a Registered Professional Geologist in Arizona, specializing in hydrogeology. He was the 2019 William A. McEllhiney Distinguished Lecturer for The Groundwater Foundation. He is a former licensed water well drilling contractor and remains actively involved in the National Ground Water Association and Arizona Water Well Association.

Cavitation is an undesirable condition that reduces pump efficiency and leads to excessive wear and damage to pump components. Factors that can contribute to cavitation, such as fluid velocity and pressure, can sometimes be attributed to an inadequate mud system design and/or the diminishing performance of the mud pump’s feed system.

When a mud pump has entered full cavitation, rig crews and field service technicians will see the equipment shaking and hear the pump “knocking,” which typically sounds like marbles and stones being thrown around inside the equipment. However, the process of cavitation starts long before audible signs reveal themselves – hence the name “the silent killer.”

Mild cavitation begins to occur when the mud pump is starved for fluid. While the pump itself may not be making noise, damage is still being done to the internal components of the fluid end. In the early stages, cavitation can damage a pump’s module, piston and valve assembly.

The imperceptible but intense shock waves generated by cavitation travel directly from the fluid end to the pump’s power end, causing premature vibrational damage to the crosshead slides. The vibrations are then passed onto the shaft, bull gear and into the main bearings.

If not corrected, the vibrations caused by cavitation will work their way directly to critical power end components, which will result in the premature failure of the mud pump. A busted mud pump means expensive downtime and repair costs.

To stop cavitation before it starts, install and tune high-speed pressure sensors on the mud suction line set to sound an alarm if the pressure falls below 30 psi.

Although the pump may not be knocking loudly when cavitation first presents, regular inspections by a properly trained field technician may be able to detect moderate vibrations and slight knocking sounds.

Gardner Denver offers Pump University, a mobile classroom that travels to facilities and/or drilling rigs and trains rig crews on best practices for pumping equipment maintenance.

Severe cavitation will drastically decrease module life and will eventually lead to catastrophic pump failure. Along with downtime and repair costs, the failure of the drilling pump can also cause damage to the suction and discharge piping.

When a mud pump has entered full cavitation, rig crews and field service technicians will see the equipment shaking and hear the pump ‘knocking’… However, the process of cavitation starts long before audible signs reveal themselves – hence the name ‘the silent killer.’In 2017, a leading North American drilling contractor was encountering chronic mud system issues on multiple rigs. The contractor engaged in more than 25 premature module washes in one year and suffered a major power-end failure.

Gardner Denver’s engineering team spent time on the contractor’s rigs, observing the pumps during operation and surveying the mud system’s design and configuration.

The engineering team discovered that the suction systems were undersized, feed lines were too small and there was no dampening on the suction side of the pump.

Following the implementation of these recommendations, the contractor saw significant performance improvements from the drilling pumps. Consumables life was extended significantly, and module washes were reduced by nearly 85%.

Although pump age does not affect its susceptibility to cavitation, the age of the rig can. An older rig’s mud systems may not be equipped for the way pumps are run today – at maximum horsepower.

It may be impractical to flush system piping during drilling operations. However, strainer screens should be checked daily to remove any debris or other flow restrictions.

1.1.1 The rig is suitable for survey and prospecting, geophysical exploration, roads and buildings and other exploration and play blasthole drilling bits projects.

1.1.4 Rated drilling depth 100m, the deepest can not exceed 120m. Nominal hole diameter of 110mm, the maximum opening straight Diameter allowed to be 130mm, the final hole diameter of 75mm, drilling depth according to ground conditions.

A mud pump (sometimes referred to as a mud drilling pump or drilling mud pump), is a reciprocating piston/plunger pump designed to circulate drilling fluid under high pressure (up to 7,500 psi or 52,000 kPa) down the drill string and back up the annulus. A mud pump is an important part of the equipment used for oil well drilling.

Mud pumps can be divided into single-acting pump and double-acting pump according to the completion times of the suction and drainage acting in one cycle of the piston"s reciprocating motion.

Mud pumps come in a variety of sizes and configurations but for the typical petroleum drilling rig, the triplex (three piston/plunger) mud pump is used. Duplex mud pumps (two piston/plungers) have generally been replaced by the triplex pump, but are still common in developing countries. Two later developments are the hex pump with six vertical pistons/plungers, and various quintuplexes with five horizontal piston/plungers. The advantages that these new pumps have over convention triplex pumps is a lower mud noise which assists with better measurement while drilling (MWD) and logging while drilling (LWD) decoding.

The fluid end produces the pumping process with valves, pistons, and liners. Because these components are high-wear items, modern pumps are designed to allow quick replacement of these parts.

To reduce severe vibration caused by the pumping process, these pumps incorporate both a suction and discharge pulsation dampener. These are connected to the inlet and outlet of the fluid end.

Displacement is calculated as discharged liters per minute. It is related to the drilling hole diameter and the return speed of drilling fluid from the bottom of the hole, i.e. the larger the diameter of drilling hole, the larger the desired displacement. The return speed of drilling fluid should wash away the debris and rock powder cut by the drill from the bottom of the hole in a timely manner, and reliably carry them to the earth"s surface. When drilling geological core, the speed is generally in range of 0.4 to 1.0 m^3/min.

The pressure of the pump depends on the depth of the drilling hole, the resistance of flushing fluid (drilling fluid) through the channel, as well as the nature of the conveying drilling fluid. The deeper the drilling hole and the greater the pipeline resistance, the higher the pressure needed.

With the changes of drilling hole diameter and depth, the displacement of the pump can be adjusted accordingly. In the mud pump mechanism, the gearbox or hydraulic motor is equipped to adjust its speed and displacement. In order to accurately measure the changes in pressure and displacement, a flow meter and pressure gauge are installed in the mud pump.

The construction department should have a special maintenance worker that is responsible for the maintenance and repair of the machine. Mud pumps and other mechanical equipment should be inspected and maintained on a scheduled and timely basis to find and address problems ahead of time, in order to avoid unscheduled shutdown. The worker should attend to the size of the sediment particles; if large particles are found, the mud pump parts should be checked frequently for wear, to see if they need to be repaired or replaced. The wearing parts for mud pumps include pump casing, bearings, impeller, piston, liner, etc. Advanced anti-wear measures should be adopted to increase the service life of the wearing parts, which can reduce the investment cost of the project, and improve production efficiency. At the same time, wearing parts and other mud pump parts should be repaired rather than replaced when possible.