Down Hole Motor Remote Visual Inspection

There is an old familiar proverb about how “for want of a nail, a kingdom was lost”. The moral of this story is that the failure or lack of even a small item can, in certain circumstances, have a very big impact. A drilling operation uses lots of very expensive equipment and supplies, and requires the expertise of several very qualified workers.

Ask anyone in the industry, and they can tell you that downtime on a drilling rig is extremely costly. This is why it is so important to keep the equipment maintained, so that failures do not occur when the rig is up and running. In this case study, we examine an oil drilling service company that was facing $8,000 repair bills every time one of their PC pump stators was pushed past its breaking point. This was bad enough, but when this happens and it shuts down the entire drilling operation, the repair bill for the stator becomes an afterthought – money is being burned every minute the drilling is stopped in order to pull and replace the mud motor.

An internal remote visual inspection (RVI) of the stator was the only way to determine the useful life and avoid damage and the associated repair and downtime costs. This company discovered that the VJ-Advance video borescope from RF System Lab provided the needed combination of portability, ease-of-use, image quality, and price. Plus, with the on-board image capture capability of the VJ-ADV, the condition and performance of each stator could be documented, helping technicians better pinpoint exactly how long the component could be used before it had to be replaced.