The persons who know solids control equipment may know well on the shale shaker and mud cleaner unit. These 2 machines are very common in solids control system that do solids separation job from the first to forth stage. The shale shaker is located at the very beginning of the mud recycling system for primary solids control; the coarse cuttings could be removed by the shale shaker. While after treated by the shale shaker, the drilling fluids would be transferred to the mud cleaner for further treatment.
For the purpose of easy maintenance, in the same solids control system, the mud cleaner is equipped with under drying shaker that is same model as the primary shale shaker. Mud cleaner is just a machine on which the cyclone frame was fixed above. The mud cleaner unit is only able to be used to separate the solids via the hydrocyclone units. Why the mud cleaner unit cannot be used as a shale shaker even if it has the under drying shaker? This is really a good question. GN’s engineer equipped a logging tank to the mud cleaner unit and the mud cleaner unit becomes a shale and mud cleaner composition unit.
Normally, GN’s shaker unit has back type logging tank that is used to collect the drilling fluids coming out from the drilling hole. The drilling fluids accumulated in the logging box firstly and then overflow into the shaker deck, thus the shaker screen will not be damaged by the high pressure drilling fluids. This unit could be used as a shale shaker unit.
De-sanding and de-silting cyclone are installed on the mud cleaner for finer solids separation. The solid discharged out from the bottom nozzle of the cyclone also has high pressure that will shorten the screen life if directly dropped onto the screen surface. To avoid this situation, there is a hopper collection box that is used as buffer between the cyclone and screen. To make this machine compact, GN’s engineer designed to insert the buffer box into the logging box, which means the logging box is also used as second buffer box for the cyclone unit. This is the function of mud cleaner.
One thing need to be noted is this shaker and cleaner machine can only be used for one function one time: either shaker or mud cleaner. This is a cost saving unit with small footprint, for some project not very urgent, this unit could be a very ideal choice. GN ever showed this unit at Beijing CIPPE, much attention was attracted there.