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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.
I've had to put Cat5 through sales and marketing cubes!
Much easier communication than the old "pulsed-bullshit" telemetry, though.
Jouster
I agree, no drill bit is ever going to need more that 640 Kbits / second.
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..
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...
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
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
In one fell swoop, every citizen in the entire country of Elbonia would suddenly have broadband access... if only they had computers.
~Philly
Cum watch this mud get DRILLED by large, sweaty guys till it begs for mercy! Now live on our webcams 24/7!
*click here*