Precision Drilling's AI-driven equipment health system now predicts up to 88% of mud pump fluid end failures, part of a rollout that has cut mud pump Code-8 nonproductive time (NPT) by 75% across the driller's fleet, Precision Drilling and technology partner Prescient Devices said in a joint technical account of the project.

The system, in development since January 2023, monitors mud pumps, top drives, engines, mud systems, catwalks and batteries on more than 120 rigs in the US, Canada and the Middle East. Across that fleet, the companies said it has cut overall nonproductive time by 50% to 70%.

Why mud pumps came first

The upstream drilling team built the tool around mud pump fluid end consumables before expanding it to other equipment. A land rig might see a top drive failure every six months, the companies said, while a mud pump fluid end can need replacement weekly, giving the model far more failure data to learn from and giving field crews a reason to check it daily. At the 2026 IADC/SPE International Drilling Conference and Exhibition, Helmerich & Payne presented data on rising workload on top drive systems, while Precision Drilling presented its own data on the increasing trend in mud pump Code 8 downtime.

How the model works

Early vibration sensors alone produced inconsistent failure predictions, the companies said, because drilling equipment runs under constantly changing loads rather than the steady conditions found in most manufacturing. A rise in standpipe pressure from 2,000 psi to 4,000 psi can push a fluid end vibration reading from 5 mm/s to 10 mm/s on its own, with no equipment problem involved.

To correct for that, the model folds in real-time operating data, including standpipe pressure, pump speed, mud flow and mud volume, alongside vibration, using more than 30 parameters in total. That parameter set produces roughly 10^43 possible combinations, too many to tune by hand, so the team runs a genetic optimization algorithm to find the best fit for each pump. The process takes about 1.5 hours per pump on a powerful computer and runs automatically once a quarter to refresh each pump's model.

Results across the fleet

The model now runs on more than 300 mud pumps. Reported results include:

  • Up to 88% of fluid end failures predicted
  • An 85% reduction in module failures, the costliest fluid end component
  • A 75% reduction in mud pump Code-8 NPT
  • Non-billable revenue down more than 90%
  • A 28% rate of penetration (ROP, the speed the bit advances through the wellbore) improvement on rigs running the solution compared with rigs that had not yet deployed it

What comes next: predicting component life

The companies are also working on remaining useful life (RUL) prediction, a technique that estimates when a component will reach end of life weeks or months ahead, rather than flagging an anomaly hours or days before failure. Physics-based RUL methods used for decades, such as S-N curve analysis, cycle counting and finite element analysis, have struggled with drilling equipment because wear on components like fluid end consumables is complex and varies with the same operating conditions that complicate anomaly prediction.