Measurement While Drilling, 2nd Edition

Chapter 15GE Oil & Gas MWD Developments (BakerHughes, a GE Company)

The Oil and Gas Technology Center (OGTC) affiliated with GE Oil & Gas (now BakerHughes, a GE Company) in Oklahoma City opened in 2016 to support innovative research in petroleum engineering, one benefiting area being Measurement While Drilling. While we cannot disclose facility details and forthcoming activities, two recent MWD patent disclosures shown below shed insight into approaches supported by this author. The first describes a novel “sandwich siren” (as in “subway sandwich”) producing twice the signal strength of conventional sirens for similar flow rate and frequency parameters, while the second introduces novel approaches to adaptive filtering in noise cancellation. Other patent applications for telemetry and power generation have also been filed and several publications are forthcoming.

Figure 15.1. Oil and Gas Technology Center (Oklahoma City).

15.1 Recent Patent Publications.

United States Patent Application US 20160201437 A1 is introduced in Figure 15.2a for “High Signal Strength Mud Siren for MWD Telemetry,” invented by the aurhor and Kamil Iftikhar for GE Energy Oilfield Technology (which in July 2017 was merged with BakerHughes). A related filing for US 20160201438 A2 is not discussed here. A generic (non-GE) mud siren with six lobes is shown in Figure 15.3, consisting of a single rotating ...