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High-Speed Data Transfer Over ... Mud
An anonymous reader writes "You might have laid Ethernet through some pretty aggressive environments, but how about through a 4-inch diameter steel pipe immersed in electrically conductive mud at pressures up to 1000 atmospheres, temperatures up to 150 deg C, and with vibrational accelerations of hundreds of g?
The Department of Energy has announced the invention of a system to allow data transmission up to 1 Mbit/s along drillpipe. That might not sound too fast, but the current technology uses some pretty neat electromechanical engineering to get ... 10 bits per second (on a good day). This will revolutionize the oil industry's ability to see where its wells are going and steer them into pockets of oil."
This is good because acording to George W. Bush the Oil companies just can't seem to get enough oil. Now they more efficiently rape the envirement.
Help I'm a rock.
While I think it's a pretty nifty thing to be able to do, all they are going to use if for is to get more oil so they can mess up the environment more... Now it would be interesting if they hooked this up so everyone in a nieghborhood could connect to each other through a mud connection :p.
I read this as M.U.D. at first (Multi User Dungeon).
"While you drill for oil, you see a vibrant pixie nearby".
"Something is scribbled in the mud here.."
The message in the mud reads: /."
"high-speed network via M.U.D. is under construction; announce it on
Possible exits: Down, Up, Home
A horse can't be sick, you know, even if he wants to.
Well that's good news! They certainly need all the help they can get bringing us all that Texas Tea that we need to live fulfilling lives.
I can sleep easy now. Thanks, technology!
Build your own website - full service homepage system your m
Why do you need 1 MB/s for a big honking DRILL? The drill doesn't need all that bandwidth.... or perhaps it needs to fulfill its porn fill of the day? ;)
Maybe eventually they can put that dust collecting above the ceiling tiles at our school to good use. I mean, the layer is about five inches thick.
Or, they could just use wifi...
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
Hey, if you used that mud as a 802.11b antenna or something, you would be WARMUDSLINGING!
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
"This is why 2.4Ghz wireless has become popular. 2.4Ghz was chosen for wireless networking because the frequency is the same as the resonance of trees and bricks, which means signals on that carrier wave can penetrate those objects leading to greater coverage."
Resonant materials stop the signal in it's tracks.
2.4 GHZ is almost useless at penetrating brick and trees. It requires true line of sight. 900Mhz is far better at penetrating these things than 2.4Ghz is.
Dense wood full of water (trees) or brick / concrete walls are the enemy of 2.4Ghz.
2.4Ghz was chosen because the band was there, and the higher frequency allowed greater data transmission than 900Mhz. For penetration of our everyday living space, 2.4Ghz is relatively shitty.
data transfer over mud isn't new. The best oilfield services companies have been doing it for quite some time.
As for why they need to get data out, consider that when you're looking for oil, you need to figure out what the EXACT geological formations look like (in 3 dimensions) a mile or 2 underneath the surface of the earth. The more data you can get out of a hole about any number of factors (rock hardness, resistivity, etc...) at a known depth, the better your odds are of figuring out what's down there in the main.
Dojo: defanging browsers so you don't have to
So does that trolling hook hurt when you bite it?
(Those rig workers are going to need to be careful with that 1 megawatt transmitter in the 2GHz range.)
1. Novell makes software and nVidia makes graphics hardware. Neither do networking or especially wireless networking hardware.
2. Resonance kills signals dead in its tracks (that's how faraday's cages work).
3. If it were possible, it would have been thought of and implimented already.
4. Nice troll.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
I'm just wondering if I was the only person who first thought the article had something to do with Multiusr Dungeons(online games).
I took that hook, line, and sinker, eh?
I'm not fully awake yet. Argh.
say miners are trapped in a tunnel a distance from the surface.
drilling out an escape tunnel you would want to know the condidtion of the rock you are going through so you dont make their situation worse or cause a cave in.
I work for an ISP that supplies connections soley via 2.4ghz, infact our entire backbone is a mixture of 2.4 and 5.8, and trust me when I say 2.4 is stubborn, it hates solid objects and water, water is evil, becuase water resinates at 2.4 aswell. Mud is semi-solid and wet, 2.4 wouldnt stand a chance.
I've had to put Cat5 through sales and marketing cubes!
Much easier communication than the old "pulsed-bullshit" telemetry, though.
Jouster
hurrah, 1mbit is worthy of a slashdotting, on three...
....cried. Personally, I think this is great, but I know some who wouldn't like this.
-Valiss
But is it backhoe proof? Then I'll be impressed.
Stupid contractors keep cutting through damn cables in my area.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
For more than 60 years, engineers have struggled with the problem of a drill pipe connection, or "tool joint," that would stand up to the wear and tear of increasingly hostile downhole drilling conditions, yet provide reliable electrical connections every 30 feet over thousands of feet of pipe penetrating deep into some of nature's harshest environments. [...]
But the excruciatingly slow pace of mud pulse telemetry - 3 to 10 bits per second - often meant that data resolution was so poor that the driller could not make crucial decisions in real time. Often, time-consuming operations would be required to retrieve the downhole data or drilling would have to stop while other procedures were employed to confirm the low-resolution data pulsed to the surface.
And there is this link, complete with pretty graphics, from the company that actually developed the technology
http://www.grantprideco.com/gptechnologies/Intelli Pipe.asp
have fun
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
"I run my drill on Linux! There's a public-domain webserver where you can view the realtime stats!"
/.'ed drillpipe.
Ugh,
Jouster
I seem to remember M.U.D. as standing for "Multi-User-Door"? Games on BBS's were called door games. Were there two meanings, or is this the same as the unknown origin of BNC?
Bzzt.
High-frequency RF does not penetrate earth very well.
2.4GHz signals, in particular, are very trouble-prone in this application, as water converts it to heat more efficiently than any other frequency. Drilling is a very wet operation.
Hint: this is why your microwave operates at 2.4GHz, and why the band is unlicensed. Because it is so readily absorbed by masonry, trees, and other relatively wet objects, it was deemed (at least a few years ago) relatively unsuitable for serious communications and kept from being sold commercially since the beginning of time.
Have you never driven through a tunnel with the radio on, or while using a cell phone? FM radio is down near 100MHz, well into the range of relatively slow data transfer.
You need VLF radio to get through that much solid crap, and once you do that, you're back into the slothly realm of measuring things in bits per minute.
'sides, aiming a 1-megaWatt microwave oven down a drill pipe would not make their already-existing heat problems any better...
Kid-proof tablet..
Bravo.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Wireless (including radio frequencies) sucks in electrically busy areas.
If your fiber optics are sucking up interference, dear god, sue the vendor for substituting a cotton string for fiber optics. Fiber is immune to non-spliced-in interference, and single-mode fiber is all but un-fuck-with-able.
Jouster
This is why wireless networking is popular in power stations, since fiber optics tend to suck up too much interference.
Good luck mods. My prediction for this post:
+2 informative
+1 insightful
-3 overrated
+3 funny
-2 troll
Lol. What an outstanding troll!
Check out Schlumberger www.slb.com. They're the 800 lb gorilla of the oilfield services industry. Their original solution to finding what was going on at the other end of a drilling rig was to simply pulse mud. Switch it on and off and measure the changes in this signal on the end of the drilling rig. When drilling a rig mud is used to stabilize the walls of the shaft . The advantage of this technique is this... No circular conductor built into the pipe means it can be adapted easily to old equipment and its cheaper. This new system described will eventually make its gains... but its gonna be a while... I saw someone mention wireless... Totally unfriendly environment and there is WAY to much noise, not to mention these holes are so deep you're not going to penetrate all the way back up the hole to the rig on the surface. Anyway... that's a really basic description of what the old new and a couple considerations are in the industry... Look up Schlumberger for a little more info... or Halliburton...
The Devil gets ethernet. (you know he'll be on AOL)
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
it's nice to see the government of the USA to finally be doing something useful for these poor, technologically limited oil companies. I'm sure they will redirect their profits gained from this technology RIGHT BACK to us citizens, eh? thanks, DOE.
it's often used to help those in the drill units under the earth to communicate with those above)
- I'm not even bothering with this one...
The benefit of higher frequencies is that they travel in straight lines
- This is apposed to, say, those low frequency waves that like to travel at right angles, right?
This is why 2.4Ghz wireless has become popular. 2.4Ghz was chosen for wireless networking because the frequency is the same as the resonance of trees and bricks,
- Lovely thought. So you're saying all our forests are going to turn into the Tacoma Narrows Bridge? After all, that is what happens when you hit an objects resonate frequency.
antenna at the drill cage is secure, and then point a high powered (say 1MW) transmitter down towards the ground, and et voila..
- Hrmmm, metallic cages... hmmm, Faraday Cages. Yup, that'll help signal reception!
- 1 mw is high power you say? Damn, my old brick cellphone should be able to reach Istanbul!
I'm surprised a big networking company like Novell or nVidia hasn't jumped on to this and started to produce expensive proprietary gear for the rich oil companies to buy
- nVidia is doing networks now? Won't they be surprised! Man, ATI will be ticked.
Either way, wireless (radio) is the way to go when sending a signal through an electrically busy area. This is why wireless networking is popular in power stations, since fiber optics tend to suck up too much interference.
- Hahhaa, I'm just laughing to hard at this one.
You know, if you are going to troll, at least make it plausible.
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
Why bother making pipes and wells smarter when we can just beat up Iraq and take their oil instead?
comrade Anonymous!
Now, all they need is XML over HTTP over IPSEC to talk with the devices. We all know that new technology is nothing without proven standards.
</RANT>
Whoa, what a coincidence. I read this story and then I heard an interview with the people actually producing this hardware on the radio. I have digital radio so I recorded it and put it on my site as a 16kbps MP3. It's only 160k. Here you go:
http://www.boog.co.uk/media/wireless-oil.mp3
mogorific carpentry experiments
Now the metaphora comes to reality:
Hey, get of your chair and go check that mudpit over there, we are been having some blackouts for the last five minutes...
Than them.
This is awesome, I am going to the office in waders and I am going to start packing in mud,pipes, and oil through the new HR department!
/.!
I am going to get away with it because I will link this article in an email to engineering discussing how this will avoid the plenum/firecode problem with UTP. I will send a second email to accounting discussing the massive ROI on using mud over expensive cabling projects.
The the only part that will be better than watching their email open for two hours will be watching them cry about having to process my raise and promotion! This is the first Monday I have looked forward to in a LONG time, THANKS
People have so much confidence in them that they're now a penny stock... Friday's trades
It's nothing but a bitter left wing bastion of premium porn (how they stay on-line) Salon Porn - um - I mean erotica
Kinda all goes together 'eh? Bush bashing, Demos and Porn?
How do you lay Ethernet? It's a frigging protocol.
to introduce you to her.
Maybe take her to a movie and dinner....
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
While I'm ranting. If western nations had have spent some of the money they used to design and build weapons to protect foriegn oil interests on renewable energy solutions instead; couldn't much of the middle east situation have been avoided?
UNIX/Linux Consulting
When will we have webcams on the drill bits?
Why is it all the whacko enviro greeny extremists seem to think that everything is an either/or proposition?
As if the DOE had a budget of X dollars and was required to spend all of X on drilling tech or all of X on alternative fuels tech.
The reality is that the budget is just that... a budget. Some money goes to oil tech, some money goes to a variety of alternative energy tech, and the rest goes into the vast sink hole of spending that is the federal beaurocracy.
Thank you for reading this far into my diatribe about the stupid and ignorant people of the world and how they managed to get on the net.
Why do you need 1 MB/s for a big honking DRILL?
Well, for starters you could put an array of accoustic, microwave, or electrical transmitters & sensors in the pipe just BEHIND the drill and image the region ahead of the drill with radar and/or sonar. If you see a pocket of something that sounds/conducts/reflects like oil a bit off to one side, you can adjust the drill to curve in that direction (or send the NEXT one over that way).
10 BPS just doesn't cut it for uploading imaging information, even if you put most of the fancy processing down with the sensore. But T1 rates are just fine.
There's lots of other stuff you want to monitor - temperature, pressure, conductivity, etc. to find out what sort of stuff you're drilling through.
And it's important to know when to give up, stop pouring money down THIS hole and start over somewhere else. It costs a LOT to run the rig long enough to drill even another foot...
I recall, back in the early days, a company in Ann Arbor made a little board with a CMOS Z80-clone, a ROM with a BASIC interpreter, a serial port, and a few I/O ports - including some analog inputs. They sold a LOT of 'em to an oil company.
Seems that every now and then they would pull up the drill and send one of these down to measure some stuff. Then they would send the drill down behind it and grind it up. It was cheaper to buy a new one (and the associated cable) each time than to leave the rig idle long enough to pull the old one up. (And considering how fast a winch can crank, and how much custom computer stuff cost back in those days, that will tell you a lot about the per-minute cost of an oil rig and drilling team.)
So imagine how much they can save if they don't need to pull the DRILL up - disassembling it as they go - then reverse the whole process to put it back down, every time they want to take another reading.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I'm a XP .NET sysadmin and the easiest solution for your problem is to install Windows XP .NET Advanced Server and use Microsoft's .NET reliabililty along with passport authentication. Using this and MSN messenger you can create a 5th dimension vortex of communication using vortex32.dll. Running MSN messenger over this creates an easy to use solution with only 1 degree of seperation.
Thank you.
Imagine a beowolf cluster interconnected with mud!
It's wonderful that the DOE pays for networking for needy companies. Is the DOE also going to fund my upgrade to 802.11a? I really need something faster than I have right now.
In one fell swoop, every citizen in the entire country of Elbonia would suddenly have broadband access... if only they had computers.
~Philly
"My modem is slower than mud"...
"The IntelliPipe is one of the most remarkable advances in drilling technology in the last 25 years," Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said. "President Bush, in the National Energy Policy, directed me to pursue advanced technology in energy production. I think the IntelliPipe is exactly the type of technology we need to move our domestic production capabilities into the next century."
That sounds like it's fresh out from the TV shop.
The western nations spent as much money on weapons as they thought was neccessary, combined with personal greed and kickbacks. Western Nations feared being conquered by the USSR and communism. Ask an oversimplified questiong, get an oversimplified answer.
As I was waiting for the link to load, I was guessing how this might be accomplished.....Pretty cool solution to this problem. The non-contact electrical connection was the most innovative thing about this. Looks like it uses an inductive ring at either end of the pipe to pass the signal.
With a little rework, existing pipes could be make to be "intelligent" like this too. You could, for instance, drop a small inductive "washer" at each of the joints and drop the cable in through the pipe. You'd only need to drill a small hole at each end of the pipe to make the connection between the washer and cable inside. I know that this is over-simplifying the situation, but my guess is that existing pipes could be reworked for perhaps $200 per segment in quantity.
Water does have resonances, but at much higher frequencies. There's a moderate water vapor resonance at 22 GHz and a much stronger one at 183 GHz.
Water is a polar molecule, so an alternating electric field at any frequency will tend to jerk it around and heat it up. In the low microwave range, the higher the frequency the more effectively water absorbs RF, which is why Ku-band satellites at 11-12 GHz are more affected by rain than C-band satellites at 4 GHz. So 2.4 GHz is actually less affected by water than many higher frequencies used for communications through the atmosphere.
So why not use the actual water resonance frequencies in microwave ovens? One, tradition: 2.4 GHz is an FCC allocation for Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) devices, including ovens. Two, 2.4 GHz magnetrons are cheap and reasonably efficient. Three, higher frequencies would be harder to contain; seals, seams, screen holes and the like would be proportionately larger at higher frequencies. Four, you don't want to use a resonant frequency, as that would only heat the outer layer of the food, leaving the inside cold and raw!
Now that the bandwidth is available, these same engineers are now working on porn and MP3 players for the drill bits to suck that up.
you drive a car?
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
.. my friends and I play quake that is networking through my septic's leech field.
So what if it smells like shit and it's outside, it's still better than routing all those pesky cat 5 cables.
I'll admit that sometimes we get some bad throughput so we have to feed Big Joe some beans to get the system going again.
Live web cams
some drilling operations use water, but all of the rigs i've worked on switched over to invert (an oil-based drilling mud) once they got past the water table. see table 1 of this pdf (p 14 of the pdf, p 9 of the printout), which compares oil-based muds and water-based muds. with OBMs, you couldn't have more than 0.6% water.
how well does paraffin or diesel block 2.4GHz?
i admit, i've only burned shovel on rigs in western and northern alberta, and not for a few years, either. perhaps water-based drilling is more popular in other places. i sense a geology/geography lesson impending...?
the only fun part about it i remember was excavating the flare pits at the start of each hole. and telling greenhorns to get me two joints.
united states nuclear device terrorist bioweapon encryption cocaine korea syria iran iraq columbia cuba
first they are the source of oil, and now, I reckon they have more mud than any of us, and could hold the world to ransom[1]![2]
[1] insert evil cackle
[2] i have not researched this, but i know for a fact my house isnt made of much mud
Or will they still have to go to war? We need Mr Burns' Slantwise Drilling Company!
Mudcam.
Look for it soon, only $1 a minute in streaming video.
Written transcript: Black, black, brown, gray, black, brown...
Say something slightly negative about oil companies, and get moderated as "flamebait".... who gave the Enron guys moderation points?
Um, anyone that starts looking into Halliburton nowadays is likely to "suddenly leave town" without telling anyone where they were "going".
couldn't much of the middle east situation have been avoided?
Sure, then Iraq'd have their weapons of mass destruction and everyone would have to listen to them.
Tho I'm kinda wondering if that's the middle east situation you're referring to... there's a lot of them.
I bet this was discovered at the university of elbonia. They know mud.
We went to fight in the middle east to raise OPEC's price per barrel because that raises US Oil (the country, not the company) prices per barrel. The whole situation is created by big oil. So I suppose so. But if we were using hydrogen, it would probably be sold to us by the people who now run big oil, and they'd find someone else to get us pushed into a war with.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Quiet you long haired hippy!
Dont you realize how important fossil fuels are!?!
Why we're willing to murder millions of innocent civilians for them in long drawn out wars.
Think solar, wind or fuel cells will ever go anywhere? Keep dreaming.
I have to go skinny dipping through my millions of dollars now.
sincerely,
fat bastard oil tycoon.
You think that's impressive, wait until they figure out how to send mud over the Internet.
Well, well, well. That's a very deep subject. [rimshot-cymbal]
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
I'm probably one of the few people who find this interesting since I was working on such devices as a software engineer up to 3 years ago. I think we were doing 1-2bits per second mud pulsing and 7-10bits per second with EMF pulsing (this is in the field). You know... the kind of place where the tools still use 8051's because you can get military grade components and need to operate at 175degC. I wonder what kind of bandwidth they get at what depths.
.5 seconds) but your baseline can change 300psi a second. Anyways, it was a fun project.
Kind of interesting when you are dealing with trying to decode data where you get 10-50psi pulses (maybe lasting around
Brian Macy
I agree. For a news source to have any legitimacy, it has to have lots of money behind it or I won't listen to anything it has to say.
What happens when the link layer is full of worms? or when some one bores a hole in your protocol (drill) stack?
Who is starting the RFC, "TCP/IP over dirt, just add water"?
Billy
Directional and horizontal drilling have been in development for the better part of 20 years. This will be a godsend to them. As it is, the equipment required to transfer control and status data back and forth to the motors is bulky, expensive, and prone to failure.
Most of you don't realize it, but this type of drilling is used all over the place now for all kinds of things. The largest use other than the oil industry is for drilling underneath things (anything, roads, buildings, ship channels, etc) so that cabling, or really damn near anything requiring a hole in the ground can be laid without destruction to the overlying structure. In the early 90's, my dad participated in a project to raise a half-sunken ship from the bottom of a Danish port. They drilled horizontally under the ground beneath the ship, and ran metal cabling underneath it. The cabling was attached to barges on either side of the ship. They pulled apart and raised it off the ocean floor.
The copper bosses killed you, Joe. 'I never died', said he.
for the people working at the sharp end of the oil business, this is great news. We routinely lower tools on more or less standard (far from it) cables to "log" the entire hole, and more importantly the oil/gas reservoir section. This ability to send broader band data should be able to free up a lot of costly time when we start running imaging tools that give us a detailed image of the rock formation properties, allowing us to produce more oil & gas from a single well - thus allowing all you ex-colonials to run your overheating processors and your gaz guzzlers (me I have 3 pairs of roller blades - how many wheels ??) ;-) :)
Current downhole technology (LWD - logging while drilling - allows us to see directional information, formeation resisitivity - a function of porosity and pore fluid properties - ie oil & gas not conductive - brine conductive, we routinely use Gamma ray radioactivity for correlation purposes - stratigraphy, and when the drillers let us we run nuclear tools that read directly formation density and porosity - of course these numbers are messed up by the thing (hydrocarbons) we are looking for - lots of computers required to sort out the nuances. Newer technology is allowing us to see Array sonic (like seismic data), CMR technology - a great way to see fluid properties. With all this band width we would be able to evaluate a hole sooner, better (less drilling fluid invasion into the reservoir), and improve reservoir and field development starting from the exploration wells, something that many companies are trying to do right now, as expenses for drilling in hostile environments can be huge - just go and hire a deepwater semi-submersible drilling rig for a month or two, then add all the other essential services for finding and producing the black stuff. As time goes on, it just gets more expensive and more challenging to find - and also a lot more interesting, thats why I love my job! - well mostly
Couple of points -
It's not real mud. It's bentonite, aka drilling mud. Keeps the hole open and lubes the tool.
This has _real_ applications for laying fiber / powerlines, etc. Currently, when someone wants to put fiber under a road, they have two options:
1) dig it up. Not real popualar with the people who live there.
2) directional drill. Basically a baby oil directional drill. The key is 'directional,' in that it can change directions. The operator on these things is guided by instinct and a soil profile (educated guess - first five feet are brown dirt, then some rocks, and maybe some black dirt.) If he can _know_ what the tool is doing, he can drill faster. Directional drilling is a must for retrofiting urban areas for fiber, and costs about two orders of magnitude higher than trenching, on a per mile basis.
So, what does this mean for you, the computer guy that could care less about oil drills? Possibly cheaper and more available broadband in urban areas.
I think I need a new sig here.
To quote from the article: Thanx, thebigmacd
The actual measurements would be something like - oh, formation resistivity (maybe 3 measurements), sonic velocity in the rock, natural gamma ray, rock density, porosity, maybe three or four bearing temperatures, a couple of voltages and currents, drillpipe dip and azimuth, vibrational frequency and amplitude, weight on bit... that would be about 20 samples. You would want to measure these at 6-inch intervals, corresponding to 30 seconds' drilling time. This means 40 data points per minute at say two bytes per point equals 80 bytes or 640 bits per minute, which would just about saturate a 10 bit/s data link. The most modern drill technology is steerable, which requires DOWNlink of data from the surface to intelligent tools downhole, as well as additional UPlink telemetry.
With pulse technology, the available bandwidth is so restricted that the engineers have to pick and choose which measurements they really need and which they can forego, or stop drilling to uplink accumulated data (did I mention that deepwater rigs can rent at hundreds of thousands of dollars a day?). With the new high-speed links we'll be able to uplink anything you can build a transducer for.
Hopefully it will help speed up the logging process so it doesn't take him so long. I remember many long stretches of time sitting in a shlumberger truck watching the data from the tool slowly coming back to us. :\
I'll be the first to say that I don't know much about drilling, except that when I turn the faucet on at my parents' house, water comes out. Every now and then, the lights dim briefly when the pump turns on... And that's nowhere near the scale being discussed.
I don't have any paraffin or diesel here, but if you do, try this quick-and-dirty experiment to measure 2.4GHz RF absorbtion:
Put a container of it in the microwave. Does it get hot? If so, how does the temperature compare to an equal amount of water in a similar container, in the same spot of the oven, after being nuked for the same amount of time?
Therein lies a rough answer to your question, though it does a ignore number of possibly important factors, such as reflection and refraction of the signals and probably a slew of others that few people outside the realm of microwave engineering really know about.
As long as you realize that your findings are based on absorbtion alone, you'll be doing fine. There's probably a proper method to quantify it with, with a proper, capitalized Unit to go along with it, if you feel like being really anal about it.
Now that I'm thinking about it more:
If the results turn out to be negative (as in, no substantial heating occurs), it might be interesting to ponder using the metal pipe as a waveguide. Such a transmission system would be incredibly efficient, but would place constraints on the type of joint used, and the length of the pipe segments would have to be precise, corresponding to some factor of the wavelength of the signal in whatever medium ends up filling the pipe.
Kid-proof tablet..
I used to work for the oil industry developing monitoring systems for drill head pumps..
Basically it was so expensive to have a oil platform shut down due to pump failure that it was better to spend a fortune predicting the decay of the pump by analysing changes in behaviour of magnetic fields in the device through monitoring electrical behavious. When the device was approaching the end of it's life they would change it during scheduled pump head withdrawls. (contraception for oil pumps)
So I don't understand why these wires couldn't be used.
No, the Gulf War was fought to keep the prices low. If Saddam had invaded Saudi Arabia, then oil could have hit $100 per barrel. And that means world economic depression, 1930's style not recession. The US and world economy is dependent on foreign oil sources (regardless of the comparative US/Venezuela/Canda import export figures), high oil prices=economic implosion.
Stating that the war was fought to keep prices high is so incredibly obtuse, I can't even begin to figure out where you're coming from with that statement unless its a paranoid deduction that Bush made money on oil=Bush must wage war to keep oil prices high.
Oh and alternative energy sources are on their way... for now though keeping oil flowing smoothly seems to be a good thing. Keeps your car going and the power station in Lagos humming.
This from my brother who works on an offshore rig. Ho hummmm. We're already using the MWD .A more expensive Tool is LWD (Log
While Drilling) used in conjunction with MWD and that saves running
Schlumberger Logs after. Although the gazbillion bytes/sec seems
interesting, so far for us an antiquated 56000 bps seems adequate and gets
us where we need to be. We read pulses in the Mud Pump Pressure created by a
tool in the MWD that is sent Bar Code lingo. I'm trying to put my head
around how faster transmission time would benefit us, but no. I am thinking
though that at some deep water drilling, which is generally say 5 times the
cost our operations are, and normally just doing Exploration ahead of guys
like us, getting some real time data while drilling to read Reservoir Data
would be a boon.
Keep me informed on the behaviour of this kernel.. As the "BugFree(tm)"
series didn't turn out too well, I'm starting a new series called the
"ItWorksForMe(tm)" series, of which this new kernel is yet another
shining example.
-- Linus, in the announcement for 1.3.29
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...