I’ll get to the clusters in a second.
Let me tell you a quick related story from my Navy days.
I worked on a submarine, which as you probably know is a fairly sophisticated machine. Nuclear reactor, torpedoes, sonar systems… you get the picture.
It was impossible to know about everything.
You had to prioritize what you absolutely needed to be able to recall from memory, and then get the rest from procedures that you were familiar with.
Everything had a procedure on the submarine, including flushing the toilet.
Anyway, one time a junior enlisted sailor corrected the captain in the control room on a small piece of a procedure for bringing fresh air into the sub.
The captain said, “ok, show me.”
In Navy parlance, that means to show him where in the written procedure he was wrong.
So the junior sailor did that, and showed the captain that he was indeed wrong.
Actually, several of us in the control room at the time knew that the captain was wrong, but didn’t have the courage to tell him, heh.
The same theme is true in this sand testing business.
You can’t possibly know everything.
Recently, I was trying my darndest to remove all the clusters from a sand sample.
Clusters are small frac sand pieces, stuck together, and then stuck together again. The result is a little mass of sand pieces that will “blow up” in the crush test and skew the results.
It is also API recommendation to have fewer than 1% clusters in any given sample.
In other words, clusters are not good for frac sand.
I was using my mill and experimenting with different ways to process the sand, but I just couldn’t find that “sweet spot” where these clusters were being “shucked” apart, but the sand wasn’t being artificially fractured by processing too much.
Very frustrating for me.
I’m both competitive and a perfectionist.
Instead of pretending like I know everything, I engaged an engineer from another competing lab (a big lab) and coordinated with her to send her some of this sand.
They have processing equipment as well.
My plan is to have them do some processing, and then ship some back to me so that I can look at it and perhaps do another sphericity and roundness.
That’s the way I run the lab.
I’m honest with my clients, and freely admit when I just can’t execute perfectly.
On the bright side, testing is done in a short time, and clients know in advance the costs so that they can budget for it.
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