Situation
An oilfield services provider in the south central United States operates and maintains critical equipment for fracking operations including fracking trucks, chemical blending vehicles, iron trucks, and other pieces of critical industry equipment on multiple oil and gas wellsites. The company serves customers within a 1,000-mile radius of their headquarters with well logging, completion, stimulation, testing, and maintenance capabilities.
Because the equipment involved in fracking is expensive to operate, downtime is costly. Companies frequently rebuild and refurbish whatever they can and invest in premium components and perishables designed to help optimize performance, increase time between service intervals, and extend equipment life.
Challenge
In 2023, the company’s maintenance team noticed they were experiencing premature pump power end failures and were unable to determine the cause. The power ends were only lasting around 2,000 hours, rather than the expected 6,000 hours. The power end failures were costing the company more than $160,000 each in replacement costs and additional downtime. The company reached out to Donaldson for help identifying the cause of the issue and to develop a long-term solution.
Solution
A team of Donaldson engineers went to the job site to examine the company’s fluid filtration systems. Filtration specialists placed Donaldson Connect filter monitoring technology at critical locations on the frack truck to help identify potential filtration and fluid cleanliness issues.
Shortly after the Donaldson Connect install, the Donaldson team was able to deduce that the power end’s filter configuration had been undersized which was allowing for premature bypass of the fluid.
The lubricating circuit on one of their pump’s power end had a high pressure differential (dP) during what appeared to be normal operating conditions. The high dP was enough to set the existing filter into bypass mode allowing fluid to bypass the filter.
As seen in the data below, captured by Donaldson Connect, the filter was consistently above 25 psid during standard operating conditions of the rig. This meant that dirty fluid was constantly bypassing the filters and reaching critical downstream components.
The Donaldson team worked with the customer’s engineering and maintenance team to develop a reliable, cost-effective solution. The customer installed and plumbed multiple Donaldson Duramax™ filters in a manifold-type solution to lower the pressure drop across the set of filters.
The custom-engineered solution allowed for flow continuity and a lower restriction across the hydraulic circuit and eliminated the premature bypass issues on the power end.
Better contaminant retention through filtration results in cleaner fluid and helps to ensure that equipment will continue to perform better, and longer, with a lower risk of wear, damage, and unplanned downtime.
