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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."
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.
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? ;)
Actually, this is good environmentally. With better drilling tech, more oil can be obtained from fewer wells, reducing the need to "explore" places like ANWAR.
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.
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.)
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...
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
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..
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
Multi-User Dungeon ... and the list goes on.
Multi-User Domain
Multi-User Dimension
Multiple User Domain
Multiple User Dialogue
Mauve Ugly Ducks
Jouster
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...
Actually, at ANWAR, they're projecting only using ice roads so, you don't even get to count the road area as 'despoiled'. The roads melt away during the non-winter months.
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
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
He's had it for a while.
Where else do you think spam originates?
Jouster
My god, mods, actually CLICK THE LINK!
They crack up laughing at the end.
Not to mention my favorite part of the "interview": "C.U.M.W.A.D. - Commications Under Mud Wireless Access Device".
By the way, it's only one guy, running his voice through EAX Pitch +/-, from the sound of it.
Jouster
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
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
What makes this article news is the sudden jump in bandwidth over the current technology: from 10bps to 1Mbps. That's a 100x increase, which sounds pretty interesting to me. I mean, if Cisco came to you and said their new switches could pass 10,000% more data per second, would you blow them off, saying "sorry, but packet switching is old news, not interested"?
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
"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.
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.
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Mudcam.
Look for it soon, only $1 a minute in streaming video.
Written transcript: Black, black, brown, gray, black, brown...
Unknown? It's a Bayonet Neill Concelman, British Naval Connector, or Bayonet Nut Connector. Check out this for details.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
You DO know that MW is not mW, right?
Heh. Big difference between mega and milli.
------
http://cooltech.org
If it ain't cool, it ain't coolt
Project requirements: Fifth power, sixth power, whatever it takes!
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.'"
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
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.
To quote from the article: Thanx, thebigmacd
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'm actually abysmal at math. Within my own idiom, my thinking is generally clear and consistent, but when it comes to simple calculations... I can get about halfway through, and then I have to wing it. I should have just said "whatever it is, it looks like a lot, so I'm interested". Oh well.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
And I'm sure that they are just going to air-lift the drilling equipment, living quarters, monitoring equipment, etc. in, right? No paths need to be made to get there, or to get the oil out.
Obviously you haven't seen pictures of it or been there yourself. Just because there aren't trees blooming 50 feet in the air doesn't make it desolate. There's this neat (but very fragile) ecology called Tundra. ANWR (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, not ANWAR) is a Wildlife Refuge for a reason. And that reason is not that is is devoid of life.
Define better. More developed. Sure. More westernized. I grant you that. But the native cultures are struggling for survival. These are cultures that have existed far longer than western "civilization".
Developing (or exploiting, it all depends on how you wish to look at it) ANWR (remember, its first and foremost a Wildlife Refuge, not an oil field) will certainly be beneficial (in the short term) to Alaska's economy. I personally wonder if the benefits are worth the potential harm.
Yeah, it's offtopic. I'm probably feeding trolls as well. Life is hell.
Why is that? They did adapt to their environment, and lived in harmony with it for many millennia. What you are describing is making your environment adapt to you.
Yes I do. Rhetorical question, I know. I use it sparingly though. I drive a small car, commute, use energy efficient appliances, etc. There is a difference between admiring a society's longevity and ability to live in harmony with nature and leaving the comforts I am accustomed to to take that way of life. I appreciate all the work that body builders go through to "get ripped", but I'm not going to expend the effort myself.
Personally, I wouldn't have classified my statements as ranting. More of a counter-point. Obviously, I'm biased.
Perhaps my point is that the way that we are accustomed to living is not sustainable long-term. The "native" populations (be it Native Alaskans, Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians, what have you) have shown that their lifestyle is sustainable long term.
Read into that what you will.