Wireless Propagation in a Metallic Pipe for the Transmission of Sensory Oil and Gas Well Data

The feasibility of a wireless system is examined for propagation inside an oil and gas well pipeline. The well bore environment is modeled as a circular aluminium pipe and treated as a metallic microwave waveguide. The experimentation test bed was based on the nominal diameters of commercially available oil and gas well pipelines. At the transceivers, half-wave dipole antennas operating at 2.5 GHz were employed. Due to the excitation frequency and the enclosed pipe environment, parameters such as the propagating mode, the directivity, and the realized effective gain of the antennas also needed to be investigated for this scenario. Additionally, a numerical transmission path loss model was developed and verified using full-wave simulations and measurements. The communications link facilitated the continuous monitoring of sensory data with real-time temperature and pressure levels transmitted using N210 universal software radio peripheral modems by National Instruments and symbol coding using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing. This study and experimental work can be a basis for the implementation of a high-speed wireless communications system for deployment inside oil and gas well pipelines for real-time data transmission at microwave frequencies.