Wireline Telemetry in the Oilfield: Breaking the 1 Mbit/s Barrier

Dr. Lloyd Clark
Principal Engineer
Deparment of Acquisition Systems
Schlumberger, Austin

Friday, December 1st, 3:00 PM, ENS 302

ldclark@austin.apc.slb.com

Abstract

This talk will describe the development of a 1+ Mbit/s wireline telemetry system for the oilfield. A brief introduction and historical overview of oilfield telemetry will be provided. Some experiments to adapt commercial ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) modems to the oilfield will be discussed. Because these experiments were unsuccessful, it was necessary to pursue the development of a custom telemetry system. A feasibility investigation found that DMT (Discrete MultiTone) modulation would be an excellent choice for an oilfield telemetry system, so development of a custom DMT system was undertaken. Some of the technical issues that were encountered will be described. Results obtained with the functioning system will be discussed and compared to simulation results from the feasibility study.

Biography

Lloyd D. Clark received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1990. He also holds M.S. (1986) and B.S. (1984) degrees from MIT. Upon leaving MIT in 1990, he joined the Schlumberger Austin Technology Center. During his career at Schlumberger he has been involved with a variety of research and engineering projects including wireline telemetry systems, wireless metering, data acquisition systems, and thermal printer design. He is currently a Principal Engineer in the Acquisition Systems department at Schlumberger.

A list of Telecommunications and Signal Processing Seminars is available at from the ECE department Web pages under "Seminars". The Web address for the Telecommunications and Signal Processing Seminars is http://signal.ece.utexas.edu/seminars