Microwave System Development for Wireless Communications Inside Oil and Gas Well Pipelines

Abstract

The modelling and design of a full wireless microwave communication system is examined, where the signal propagates within an overmoded circular metallic pipeline. Applications include the oil and gas industry. A specific link budget equation was also developed for the S-band transmission system and measured successfully using a 36-meter carbon steel pipeline, which can be easily extended to more than 150 meters. Also, based on the measured system data, the receiver sensitivity was determined to be −77 dBm and 15 dB in terms of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Additionally, some digitized images, sensory information such as temperature and pressure, and live stream videos were successfully transmitted and monitored in realtime, using N210 universal software radio peripheral (USRP) modems by National Instruments and coded in Matlab/Simulink and LabVIEW. To the best knowledge of the authors, no similar microwave communication system has been developed with supporting theory, full wave simulations, and measurements for propagation within for oil and gas industry wells.INDEX TERMS Circular waveguide, digitized image, mandrel, live stream video, OFDM, oil and gas well, sensory data, transmission path loss, Yagi-Uda PCB-based antenna.

Long-Range Wireless Communication for In-Line Inspection Robot: 2.4 km On-Site Test

“…However, as given in the experimental study [25], VLC was developed for short-and middle-range data communication. In [26], a microwave communication system was developed for oil and gas pipelines with a good signal-tonoise ratio (SNR) (15 dB) at 2.4 GHz. However, this study presents 36 m straight pipeline communication and indicates that their proposed system can provide communication up to 150 m, which is a very short distance for ILI robots.…”

“…A pipeline can act as a waveguide to frequencies in the few GHz range, which is suitable for commercially available radio modems. A pipeline can also support the direct signal injection of a signal with a frequency of a few kHz, which requires much more power for the same distance [26,27]. For example, in [28], a gas distribution pipeline was used as a communication channel to avoid installing a dedicated data transmission system.…”