Browsing by Author "Almeida Costa e Silva, Ingrid"

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    Medium-assisted Microwave Telemetry for Directional Drilling Applications
    (2020-09-25) Almeida Costa e Silva, Ingrid; Mintchev, Martin P.; Yadid-Pecht, Orly; Onen, Denis; Fapojuwo, Abraham O.
    The drilling industry has an increasing reliance on sensor telemetry systems in order to improve process efficiency and safety. Typically measured in terms of throughput, telemetry performance is in constant need for improvements for better measurement and logging while drilling tools to be employed to ensure safer and more cost-effective wellbore drilling, particularly in directional drilling applications. Recent works have shown remarkable improvements in telemetry performance via the use of radio frequency (RF)-based telemetry. However, these systems have not been designed to work in water-based environments because of water's high electromagnetic attenuation effect in the microwave band. In this work, I propose and test a new medium-assisted RF-based telemetry system that allows for improved drilling telemetry performance in water-based scenarios. The approach, named microwave telemetry (MWT), makes use of an added propagation medium to allow for improved radio communication via reduced signal attenuation within the communication channel. To test the foundations of the MWT system, I inserted two XBee S2C RF modules into three dielectric rods made out of different dielectric materials. I show that the addition of the rods into a water-based environment significantly increased the throughput and reduced the bit error ratio and packet loss ratio of the system. I also show that different materials presented statistically significant better network performance in accordance with the order of improved electromagnetic properties. These statistically significant (p-value < 0.05) results indicate a path towards which RF-based telemetry systems could be used in water-based drilling environments.