Brandt Shaker Screen Replacement – Drilling Fluid Equipment

Brandt Shaker Screen

Brandt shaker screen is the key component in shale shaker equipment. They function as a sieve to block the solid drilling waste and let the precious drilling fluid to be carried to a separate channel for further treatment.

Shaker Screen is used in Shale Shakers as part of solid control system in drilling operations of various industries, such as oil and gas drilling, mining, coal cleaning, etc. They primarily serve the purpose of separating drilling cuttings from the drilling fluids.

 

Brandt shaker screen replacement
Brandt shaker screen replacement

Drilling fluid is a cocktail of number of chemicals that help in the drilling process. Drilling fluid is prepared in two variations – water based and oil based, and they are very costly to obtain. They serve as lubricant agent to keep the drilling waste management system efficiently functioning. They keep the drilling bit cool and clean to penetrate deeper into the borehole.  And because of these reasons, operators invest in technologies to lower their overall operational cost and also for the environmental purpose. Shale Shaker are one such equipment to achieve that goal.

Shaker Screen has two integral parts – a screen Panel and a screen Mesh. A screen panel will hold the mesh in place, to efficiently serve its purpose. It is much like a larger frame that holds smaller sections of the mesh with help of intersections. The frame itself comes in different material and shape. One key differentiator among them is the area of mesh between these intersection, that could be utilized for the screening. These intersections are known as “blanking”. The lower the blanking better the shaker screen’s performance.

The screen mesh could be understood as a piece of cloth woven with the wires to form fine rectangular openings. The screen mesh comes into variety in terms of its durability and conductance. Then there is a binding agent that joins the screen panel with the screen mesh.
The most modern development in shaker screen field is introduction 3D screen technology.

How to Compare the Quality of Shaker Screens

Shaker Screens

American Petroleum Institute has laid down the guidelines for solid control systems in drilling industry. However, the main purpose of this standardization was to provide the end user with a fair idea of what they are investing their money into, when the purchase a certain type of shaker screens.

Now, before we delve into the benchmarking by API, let us give you an overview of what the shaker screen is or why is it that important to be researched about?

shaker screens
shaker screens

Drilling is widely used activity in oil and gas industry, to obtain deep seated fossil fuel to fulfill the fuel requirement across the globe, and that makes this industry quite enormous. The drilling operations are carried out on hard ground surface or on the ocean surface. In the entire drilling process, one of the main challenges is the handling of the drilling waste , it is called solid control system. The drilling waste mainly consists of drilling cuttings (solid) and drilling fluid (mud). Now the drill cuttings are nothing but the rock shavings and other hard particles that are extracted during drilling, the drilling fluid is a mixture of different chemicals and oil or water. The drilling fluid is quite expensive substance and is added to the drilling process to help drilling waste equipments lubricated and cool, besides other things.

API being one of the largest trading group of US in drilling industry, has set up certain industry standards to test the quality of shaker screens, that are respected worldwide. Based on these tests, they have labeled different shaker screens sizes that approved by ISO, and encourage the manufacturers to use those labels on the product to enable the end user for a fair comparison before purchase.

While quality of different shaker screens cannot alone assure its performance, as the actual performance, in terms of conductance and life, will depend on a variety of aspects. To name a few – Handling of shaker screen, installation and replacement, appropriate tensioning, deck rubbers, storage and cleaning, volume of mud and solids, etc.