What Is RC Drilling?

What Is RC Drilling?
Reverse circulation drilling is one of the post popular methods of mineral exploration drilling. Born in Australia, we’re going to look through and give you an introduction to RC drilling.

Here’s what we’ll be covering:

The Basics of Reverse Circulation Drilling

The Cost of RC Drilling

Reverse Circulation Drill Rigs

How Does RC Drilling Work?

RC Drill Rod Suppliers

The Basics of Reverse Circulation Drilling
Reverse Circulation drilling, or RC drilling, uses rods with inner and outer tubes, the drill cuttings are returned to surface inside the rods. The drilling mechanism is a pneumatic reciprocating piston known as a hammer driving a tungsten-steel drill bit.

The Cost of RC Drilling
Reverse Circulation drilling can be among the cheapest forms of surface drilling. For more information on the true cost of RC drilling you can read more here!.

In geneal, RC drilling is slower and costlier but achieves better penetration than RAB or air core drilling; it is cheaper than diamond coring and is thus preferred for most mineral exploration work.

What is RC Drilling? A guide by Harslan Industries
Reverse Circulation Drill Rigs
RC drilling utilises much larger rigs and machinery and depths of up to 500 metres are routinely achieved. RC drilling ideally produces dry rock chips, as large air compressors dry the rock out ahead of the advancing drill bit.

How Does RC Drilling Work?
The Method
Reverse circulation is achieved by blowing air down the annulus of the rod, the differential pressure creating air lift of the water and cuttings up the inner tube which is inside each rod. It reaches the deflector box at the top of the drill string then moves through a sample hose which is attached to the top of the cyclone.

Internal Workings
The drill cuttings travel around the inside of the cyclone until they fall through an opening at the bottom and are collected in a sample bag. For any drill hole there will be a large number of sample bags, each one marked to record the location and drilling depth that the sample was obtained.

Assays
The collected series of sample bag cuttings are later taken for analysis to determine the mineral composition of the drill hole. The analysis results of each individual bag represents the mineral composition at a particular sample point in the drill hole. Geologists can then survey the drilled ground analysis and make decisions about the value of the overall mineral deposit.