Abstract
Alternative wireless data communication systems are a necessity in industries that operate in harsh environments such as the oil and gas industry. Ultrasonic guided wave propagation through solid metallic structures, such as metal barriers, rods, and multiwire cables, have been proposed for data transmission purposes. In this context, multiwire cables have been explored as a communication media for the transmission of encoded ultrasonic guided waves. This work presents the proprietary hardware design and implementation of an automatic data transmission system based on the propagation of ultrasonic guided waves using as communication channels a high-temperature and corrosion-resistant oil industry multiwire cable. A dedicated communication protocol has been implemented at physical and data link layers, which involved pulse position modulation (PPM), digital signal processing (DSP), and an integrity validation byte. The data transmission system was composed of an ultrasonic guided waves PPM encoded data transmitter, a 1K22 MP-35N multiwire cable, a hardware preamplifier, a data acquisition module, a real-time (RT) DSP LabVIEW (National Instruments, Austin, TX) based demodulator, and a human-machine interface (HMI) running on a personal computer. To evaluate the communication system, the transmitter generated 60 kHz PPM energy packets containing three different bytes and their corresponding integrity validation bytes. Experimental tests were conducted in the laboratory using 1 and 10 m length cables. Although a dispersive solid elastic media was used as a communication channel, results showed that digital data transmission rates, up to 470 bps, were effectively validated.
Highlights
Harsh environments characterize cased hole production engineering structures in the hydrocarbons sector, for example, downhole oil reservoirs either onshore or offshore could be immersed underwater or in corrosive liquids and high-temperature high-pressure boreholes’ surroundings [1]
We proposed a downhole instrument that is able to periodically transmit ultrasonic guided waves signals via a multiwire cable indicating that the instrument is operating correctly and sending complementary information related to the recorded bottom hole parameters
The pulse position modulation (PPM) demodulator and the digital signal processing algorithms run over the cRIO FPGA, which is used to transmit the results and information to a personal computer via Ethernet to form the IHM
Summary
Harsh environments characterize cased hole production engineering structures in the hydrocarbons sector, for example, downhole oil reservoirs either onshore or offshore could be immersed underwater or in corrosive liquids and high-temperature high-pressure boreholes’ surroundings [1]. Termed well log, are surface read-out measurements that are achieved either in real time using electrical signals via power line communications and a multiwire cable as communication channel, or the data can be stored downhole in a bottom hole instrument operated by batteries and reviewed when it is retrieved later In the former approach, downhole environmental factors, mainly high temperature, increase the electrical resistance in the cables and modify the behavior of the passive electrical components, for example, imposing important deviations in central frequencies of front-end filters, thereby compromising the propagation of electrical signals for data transmissions [6,7,8].
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