Mud agitator is an important part of the mud solids control system. It is mounted on the circulating tank and used in a surface mud system to suspend solids and maintain a homogeneous mixture throughout the system.

Types of drilling fluids mixing mud agitator

A mechanical agitator is driven by an explosion-proof motor, coupled to a gear box that drives the impeller shaft. The impellers transform mechanical power into fluid circulation or agitation. The objective is to obtain a uniform suspension of all solids.

The drilling mud agitator drive structure is mainly composed of a motor, reducer, coupling, and mixing shaft. The most common types of drilling mud agitators as solids control equipment is not much. The main types are as follows:

Gear drive structure mud agitator: the advantage is higher transmission efficiency; the shortcoming is a larger volume, not easy to maintain. Gear drive can be divided into direct drive and belt drive.

Bevel gear drive structure mud agitator: has the advantage of a simple structure, but also has many shortcomings. For example: due to drive ratio restriction, if you want to get slow-speed of revolution drilling mud agitator, must be through the pulley to do a larger reduction, the results not only low efficiency but also large volume. This kind of structure is rare in drilling mud agitators.

Gear reducers are worm type or helibevel type depending on the choice of the user.

At present most used mud agitator is still worm and gear drive. Worm and gear direct drive has the advantage of simple structure, large gear ratio, and high reliability, widely used in mud cleaning systems.

Agitator function in drilling mud process

In order to keep the drilling fluids even and make particles suspending, we need to fix the agitators on the recycling tank. Agitating will promote the coordination of drilling mud material, such as bentonite and barite. The agitation is very important to dissolve the bentonite, it increases the area between each part and increases the speed of the reaction.

What will keep drilling mud density and other features steady? We should keep the agitator working continuously to avoid solid precipitating and keep solid suspending is helpful to separate them by desander, desilter, and decanter centrifuge, etc.