Patent ID: 9739111
Date: 2017-08-22
CPC Classifications: E21B

Claim:
1. A controlled aperture ball drop, comprising: a ball cartridge adapted to be mounted to a frac head or a high pressure fluid conduit and further adapted to support a frac ball stack arranged in a predetermined size sequence; an aperture controller adapted to incrementally control a size of an aperture at a bottom end of the frac ball stack to sequentially drop frac balls from the frac ball stack; a control console that accepts operator input to create a ball stack list arranged in a size sequence from a smallest to a largest frac ball to be dropped by the aperture controller, and further accepts input from the operator to drop a next frac ball in the ball stack list; an onboard processor that accepts data and commands from the control console to configure the ball stack list and subsequently drop the next frac ball in the ball stack list, and returns data to the control console after each frac ball has been dropped to permit the control console to display data and draw graphs that are displayed to the operator to confirm that each of the respective frac balls has been dropped by the aperture controller.