Frac Sand Crush Test - Part 3 (partially censored!)

Описание: For more information on crush testing, go to: http://www.GlobalEnergyLaboratories.com

Now, we’re ready to crush some sand.

This is the sand crush cylinder and piston assembly. I placed that carefully and move it up into the center. Here is the gauge, which actually reads out into pounds-force. We have to get a conversion to get the PSI inside the cylinder. We’re going to use the dimensions of the cylinder and make sure that we’re crushing it accurately.

I have a note in here showing us what pressure we’re gonna ramped up to and do our hold. In the crush test, we go up at 2,000 pounds, meaning 2,000 PSI per minute and do a two-minute hold at the target stress. But, in this case, we’re going up to 4,000 PSI, which is called the 4K. The pounds we’re going up to is 12, 570 pounds, but don’t exceed 12,800 pounds. Ramping up 2000 PSI per minute, we are going to hold it for two minutes at the 4000 PSI level. Just raise the cylinder, then increase the pressure by basically jacking it overtime and reading out in pounds-force on the gauge here and now.

Here is something that I’m not going to show you. It is how I actually ramped up and hold the pressure because it’s something that’s called a proprietary in the lab to help us accurately raise a pressure manually and hold it. It’s a secret that I only share with our clients. So, I’m not going to show you the process of jacking up the pressure. And it’s actually kind of boring, too. I’ll stop here, and then when we resume, I’ll be taking the crush cylinder out, the test will be complete, and then we’ll sift the sand down. I’m gonna crush this right now, and I’ll be back with you in a second.

I just finished crushing the sample which is a 20-40 sand sample at 4000 PSI. Now, what we’re going to do is to take the cylinder out, set it down, and then I’ll show you the next section. We’ll just remove it and see that it’s already been crushed. It looks the same now, right?

There is our crushed cylinder, and our piston that looks just exactly the same way we pull it out of the carver hydraulic press and sitting next to that is a stack of sieves.

We just crushed a 20-40 sized sand. So, what we have here is a sieve stack made up of a 20 sieve on top, 40 mesh sieve in the middle, and a pan on the bottom. We’ve weighed the pan and recorded its mass, prior to doing this sieve, take the contents out of the crush cylinder, which is our crushed 20-40 sand sample, poured it into the top, and then we’ll shake it for 10 minutes.

Now, whatever comes out of the pan is what we’re interested in -- how much is crushed down so that they were smaller than a 40-sized sieve and ended up in the pan. We’re gonna record that mass and figure out what percentage crushed into fines at 4000 PSI. We’re just going to pour that in here, remove the piston carefully, hold it over my pan again and get every single particle of sand that we can into the sieve stack. Basically, I’m brushing off all the little dusted particles until the piston is clean. Here’s our cylinder. We hardly can tell what happened in there but it did get crushed. Carefully, I poured it into the top, and brush it to get every speck into the sieve stack. It’s going to take a little bit of time.

We have the sand right here and ready to go into the sieve shaker. Let me show you our Ro-tap trustworthy sieve shaker. I’ll open this up, sieve stack goes in the top, then I’ll tighten the tray. This goes on top of the sieve stack. It’s got a cork so the tapper taps it, dropping that on top of the sieve stack. I usually give it one more nice tight and turn before I set it for 10 minutes and start it.