Performance Study Of A Bench Scale Shale Shaker

Author : Saeid Ghaniyari Benis
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 204 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (12 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Performance Study of a Bench Scale Shale Shaker written by Saeid Ghaniyari Benis and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The shale shaker has been used in the drilling industry for many years for removing sand and coarse particles from drilling fluids. The performance envelopes of most shale shakers were determined empirically. Systematic empirical studies of full scale shakers are difficult and expensive to conduct due to the high volumetric flow rates of drill fluid and coarse materials flowing through the shaker. In a recent effort to reduce the experimental costs, a bench scale shale shaker provided by M-I SWACO was tested. As an initial performance characterization of the bench scale shaker, the bench scale shaker was evaluated in the separation of sand from a sand-water slurry. In a shale shaker operation, the coarse particles form a cake on the screen as the liquid phase flows through the cake and through the screen. The vibrations move the cake of solids forward on the screen until the cake falls off the end of the screen.The operating envelope of the bench scale shaker was developed for separating 2, 4, and 6 % concentrations by mass of sand in water for variations of vibration frequency, deck angle, and vibration acceleration. The results showed that the flow rate of liquid leaving at the bottom of screen and velocity of the wet sand cake exiting the screen decreased with deck angle and increased with acceleration. The cake velocity increased with the vibration frequency and resulted in thinner sand cakes on the screen. The moisture contents of the exiting sand cakes were strongly dependent on the frequency, moderately dependent on the acceleration, and were weakly dependent on deck angle. In the second phase of this research, the prior continuum model of the cake is improved and model calculations are compared with experimental data from a bench scale shale shaker (M-I SWACO, A Schlumberger Company). Few studies have been published on the performance of shale shakers. Experimental studies of shale shaker performance have been limited for several reasons, but mainly because they are time consuming and expensive to conduct. The slurries of fine and coarse particles tend to settle with gravity making consistency of the solids concentrations very difficult to achieve with the large volumes of fluid required during the operation of a full scale shale shaker. To overcome some of the experimental issues of a full scale shaker a custom made small scale shaker was fabricated and tested. To evaluate the small scale shaker performance without the variabilities introduced by the presence of clay particles, the experiments were conducted with sand as the coarse particles and water as the liquid phase. The small scale shaker reduced the operating time needed to reach steady state and it reduced the volume of liquid required for the operation. The results of this work will serve as a baseline for the shaker performance for comparison in future works with fluids containing fine clay.