Abstract
Active seismic surveys, for the exploration of oil and gas reservoirs, are conducted using a huge network of geophone sensors (>10,000) covering a very large area and interconnected using seismic cables. Such cables enable reliable operation and fast data transfer, but account for a major percentage of the survey cost and limit its flexibility. In this paper, a wireless seismic data acquisition system that provides real-time data transmission for active seismic surveys is designed and implemented. A system that comprises a smart wireless sensor node and a gateway unit is demonstrated as a proof-of-concept. The smart wireless node comprises a geophone sensor, a high-resolution data acquisition system and a smart reconfigurable wireless communication module. The data acquisition system includes an electronic circuit for amplification and filtering, a single-board computer and a 24-bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC). The wireless communication module comprises a 2.4 GHz radio frequency (RF) transceiver connected to a pattern reconfigurable antenna. A microcontroller is employed to reconfigure the Yagi-Uda antenna to scan its radiation pattern in different directions and focus the radiated power in the direction of the nearest gateway. This high-gain directional antenna would allow communication between the sensor node and the gateway over a longer distance as compared with the monopole antenna conventionally employed in commercial wireless seismic systems. The proposed system, employing a reconfigurable antenna in the sensor node, has been implemented and tested and was able to successfully capture seismic data from the geophone sensor and transmit it wirelessly in real-time to the gateway unit, achieving a notable 25% enhancement in the communication range between the sensor node and the gateway. This communication range enhancement results in a significant 56% enhancement in the gateway's communication area coverage, when compared to similar systems that use conventional monopole antennas in their sensor nodes.
Highlights
Over the past few decades, major industries have been directing their interest and resources towards monitoring and exploration of the Earth’s subsurface including its underlying structure and stratigraphy [1]–[10]
This paper presents the design and implementation of a fully functional smart wireless geophone sensor network for seismic data acquisition
The smart feature of the geophone sensor node was achieved by means of a pattern reconfigurable antenna whose radiation can be switched in three different directions (−90◦, 0◦ and 90◦), in order to direct its radiation power in the direction of the nearest gateway
Summary
Over the past few decades, major industries have been directing their interest and resources towards monitoring and exploration of the Earth’s subsurface including its underlying structure and stratigraphy [1]–[10]. This work focuses on the design and implementation of the geophone sensor node (GSN) given these stringent power consumption constraints, with greater focus on optimizing power usage in sending data over the RF link to the gateway. A smart wireless geophone sensor network for real-time seismic data acquisition is designed, implemented, and tested. Unlike available commercial wireless seismic data acquisition systems [11], [12], that employ conventional low-gain omni-directional wire antennas, the use of the novel high-gain directional antenna system proposed in this work enables the RF front-end to steer its radiated beam towards the nearest gateway for efficient energy focusing and enhanced achieved transmission ranges [20]–[23], as will be demonstrated throughout this paper.
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