Vertical Cuttings Dryers are generally used to reduce the amount cuttings discharge from water based mud (WBM), oil based mud (OBM) or synthetic based mud (SBM). Right now, as people pay much more attention to environment protection, the cuttings dryer are used more frequently.
There’s another important reason, according to research, 1 to 4 barrels of clean drilling liquids can be also be recycled when 1 barrel of drill cuttings are separated by solids control equipment, which means using vertical cuttings dryer is very cost-effective in the long run.
Depend on different situation, we can choose a screw conveyor or a vacuum device to transport the drilling fluids to the vertical cuttings dryer. In the daily use, it’s quite common that a vertical cuttings dryer is equipped with a screw conveyor.
GN Vertical Cuttings Dryer uses centrifugal force to dry drilled solids from oil or synthetic base fluids. The drying efficiency can be reached to less than 5%
A: 1-shale shaker; 2-mud cleaner; 3-auger conveyor; 4-vertical cuttings dryer; 5-waste discharge;6- recovery of mud; 7- Collection Tank; 8-centrifuge feeding pump or screw pump; 9-centrifuge 10-solid discharge port; 11- Clean mud recovery mud system.
From the above picture, we can see clear about the workflow: Drilling mud from rig enter into shale shaker(1),mud cleaner(2).After treating by these two steps, the drilling cuttings enter into vertical cuttings dryer by auger conveyor(3). Solids enter the Vertical Cuttings Dryer (4) through the top feed inlet and are separated inside the Dryer. The clean solids exit the bottom of the Dryer and are discarded overboard (5) or collected in Cuttings Boxes for offsite transport and disposal. The recovered liquid is routed to a Liquid Collection Tank (7). The recovered liquid is conveyed by screw pump (8) and then processed through a decanting centrifuge (10) for final clarification, storage, and reuse (11).
The drilling fluids from vertical cuttings dryer contain a percentage of low gravity fine solids. Before the mud is discharged to the active system, it should be treated by a high speed centrifuge. However, this may not be necessary in all conditions.