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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."
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They talk about the problems suffered with sending electrical signals down wire surrounded by 'conductive mud' (known as 'mudwire' in the oil trade - it's often used to help those in the drill units under the earth to communicate with those above) but there is a simpler solution. Use something in the Ghz range, like 2.4Ghz wireless, for example.
The benefit of higher frequencies is that they travel in straight lines, and are less prone to interference from the outside. 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.
The oil people would probably need to use a slightly lower frequency (for optimal use) to compensate for the lower density of the mudwire, but even 2.4Ghz would work. Simply make sure the antenna at the drill cage is secure, and then point a high powered (say 1MW) transmitter down towards the ground, and et voila.. you have wireless networking at 10Mbps.
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. Perhaps the time has now come.
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.
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And "environmentally-friendly" coal.
And George *. Bush, for that matter.
I'm tired of this fucking bullshit. This comment was not "funny" by any stretch of the imagination. Normally when I respond to "SEWilco" I like to make references to the fact that he is gay, is stupid, and/or will never touch a living female human but I just can't do that with this post. I'm really being quite serious right now. Idiot moderators shouldn't encourage worthless dickbags like SEWilco by modding him up. In fact, there should be an option to mod him down as a dickbag with no life. I can just picture SEWilco sitting in front of his little computing machine, think he's so funny when he types his boring and stupid bullshit, then laughing really loudly about it until he can't breathe. Yes, that's right - the stupid motherfucker is a stupid, fat motherfucker. He's a loser, let's face it. This is all I have to say for tonight. I'm so fucking disgusted and fed up with the human race, primarily because of petty bullshit like this SEWilco's entire life. Fuck him up his stupid ass, the fucking cockfaggot. He should go teabag his father a few more fucking times.