Posted by Daniel Gleeson on fifth August 2024
Evolution Drill Rigs out of Queensland, Australia, believes it has provide you with an economical and time saving resolution to some of the labour-intensive components of the exploration drilling operation: dealing with drill rods.
Its Evolution EVO Multi-Load drill rod dealing with system is a real “palms free” diamond drill rod & casing dealing with and storage system, in line with Basic Supervisor, John Slattery, explaining that it has been designed to work with most present exploration drill rigs, together with the Evolution FH2000 & FH3000 and Sandvik DE840 & DE880 drills.
Evolution just isn’t the primary to return onto the market with a palms free rod dealing with system – readers could also be considering of Boart Longyear, Epiroc, Main Drilling, MEDATech Engineering’s Borterra division and others right here – however Slattery is satisfied the EVO Multi-Load system has the potential to make the largest market impression.
“By selecting to design a system to work along with present rig designs, the drilling contractors are capable of utilise present gear with just a few small adjustments,” he instructed IM. “Relatively than spend money on fully new drill rigs and dealing with techniques, they will save important capital outlay by investing within the EVO Multi-Load system.”
The opposite advantage of working with the prevailing rigs is the elevated effectivity of rod tripping operations by utilizing the prevailing rig most important winch, he defined. “The flexibility to journey rods in 9-m lengths on deep holes throughout bit adjustments and ‘Navi-runs’ is a major time saving technique when in comparison with tripping rods in both 3-m or 6-m lengths as another rod dealing with techniques are restricted to,” Slattery added.
The corporate already has one firm talking to those advantages too, with South32 lately operating a 12-month trial of the EVO Multi-Load prototype on the Jessica and Cararra exploration tasks within the Northern Territory of Australia. The corporate performed this trial with its contract accomplice DDH1 Drilling, owned by Perenti, and mentioned it was a “success” with plans to deploy the system on different South32 exploration tasks in its 2025 monetary 12 months.
Slattery mentioned the corporate’s ongoing testing of the prototype rig – within the workshop and the sector – had led to an ongoing enchancment plan forward of commercialisation.
“Our engineering employees have labored intently with our buyer DDH1 Drilling throughout the EVO Multi-Load improvement and our workshop crew continued this throughout the testing part and subject trials,” he mentioned. “We recognized some areas for enchancment throughout the workshop testing, which had been integrated into the rod loader previous to the sector check: the sequencing of including and eradicating rods from the loader has simplified the operation and helped with productiveness.
“We’ve just a few extra updates within the pipeline to streamline the tripping course of and improve general productiveness.”
This course of has been aided by collaboration with DDH1 Drilling, in line with Slattery, permitting the corporate to know the contractor’s strategies and necessities for dealing with rods throughout deep coring and directional drilling. “This allowed us to additional develop our idea right into a working prototype,” he mentioned.
DDH1 Drilling’s expertise with the usage of a number of different kinds of drill rod dealing with system has allowed Evolution to benchmark operational cycle instances towards competitor merchandise and make sure the productiveness of the EVO Multi-Load system, he added.
Outdoors of the highest head drive multi-purpose drills the Evolution system has already been designed to work on, there may be the prospect of increasing this record additional with just a few small tweaks.
“In areas outdoors of our native Australia, equivalent to Africa and South America, there’s a massive present fleet of multi-purpose drills that would most certainly use the system,” Slattery mentioned.
This speaks to the religion Slattery has within the world potential of the system.
“We consider nearly all of the drilling contractors and mining firms are eager about enhancing the operational security round drilling tasks basically, and drill rod dealing with is a giant a part of that,” he defined. “The EVO Multi-Load drill rod dealing with system has been designed across the wants of deeper core and directionally drilled holes, massive volumes of drill rods, in addition to the necessity to cope with totally different pipe and casing sizes. These extra advanced drilling applications are usually undertaken by the bigger mining firms which have been calling for decreased human involvement within the drill rod dealing with course of for a while.”
He concluded: “Our system has been designed to work with a spread of rod and casing sizes and is versatile sufficient for use on any brownfields exploration drilling program that entails the necessity to drill deep holes.”
