ZZZ Online | Other Issues

PhoneSecure

On 12 January, 2005, by se99jmk

I'm not generally an insecure person. I'm perfectly happy with carrying in excess of ?1000 in electronics on my person... well, maybe I should get some protection after all, and I've found it, in the form of PhoneSecure.

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Phraselator

On 12 January, 2005, by se99jmk

One step closer to the babelfish from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

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Epson fabricates 20-layer PCB using InkJet tec

On 05 November, 2004, by Dreadnought

Epson has fabricated a 200micron thick 20 layer using their own InkJet technology with a conductive ink containing silver micro-particles measuring from several nanometers to several tens of nanometers in diameter, and a newly developed insulator ink.

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PetaPixel displays, 100TB storage and more...

On 05 November, 2004, by Dreadnought

Colossal Storage is developing 14M dpi or 200Tpixels per square inch of near-non-volatile display. It is based on a ferroelectric material which gives each pixel a state retension of up to 12 hours. Display resolutions of up to 4Petapixel will be possible with this technology.
Colossal Storage is also developing a holographic media which can store 10TB on a single 3?" disc. The theory behind it can go up to 1.5Exabytes (1.5x10^1.
They are currently looking for companies who are interresting in licensing the products.

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Bots and Bombs

Asimov's Thoughts Come to Bear ... What's up with the Asimo?

Somehow this all brings me to think more about robots ... we're getting to the point now where we really don't notice so much that there are pieces of machinery out there thinking and acting autonomously (and not so autonomously sometimes). Although the above website about the NS-5 (for the movie "I Robot") is a joke, robots aren't.

Robots, I would imagine, have their own set of the "three I's" in the form of the Laws of Robotics. If the robots in The Matrix or AI actually heeded these, we'd have less cause for alarm.

I keep hearing about the ASIMO but wonder what it's really all about. It's really nothing new under the sun as Honda's been toying around with two-legged robotic walkers for quite a while now (since 1986 and its E0 model) ...

"Honda stressed that there is a long way to go before specific roles can be assigned to humanoid robots. Honda is already renting out ASIMO to corporations and organisations in Japan for promotional roles such as welcoming visitors."

I wonder how far Honda is willing to go along the "welcoming visitors" theme. No doubt they weren't truly thinking for "sex add-ons" for their flagship product like some peculiar person has been ... I'm going to assume that it's just a poor-taste hoax until I see some weird mock-up of Jude Law. That would put a whole new meaning into the term "Enjoy Asimo" (shudders).

Bomb Squad Bots and Bomb Disrupters

When it comes to more strict adherance to the Robotic Laws, I'd say that the poor Bomb Squad Bots do the best job of protecting human life. I recently watched a show on TechTV called "The Tech Of: A Bomb Squad" and was literally blown away by the methods they use when defusing various bombs.

Although there are special suits that people can wear to protect themselves from the blast of a bomb robots are I think preferred; you can always rebuild a robot and have its brain saved on hard-disk, but obviously not so for human beings. Apart from picking up the bomb and moving it to a safe detonation area, robots are often rigged with "bomb disruptors" to ideally disable the devices.

Various models of bomb disrupters are in use, devices designed to permeate the pre-blast bomb with water and render it mostly harmless. Water, being incompressible, enters the bomb at extremely high velocity and rips it apart. With the bomb in many pieces and saturated by water as well, it's then a lot less of a hazard.

The properties of such a device are fairly simple.

"The CFSSC Disrupter consists of a rectangular container frame into which blast/flame attenuation foam has been moulded. A secondary water-filled "bowl" is backed with a layer of Detasheet C 1.5 (or similar sheet explosive) supplied by the user and then fitted inside the cavity of the moulded foam. The explosive is detonated at the apex of the bowl such that a coarse jet of water is launched at the suspect target. While this water jet has sufficient velocity and profile to disrupt the target, the jet velocity is not sufficient to induce sympathetic detonation in the target (based on a Forcite 75 dynamite target at a 3 m (10 ft.) distance). "

The micro bomb bot versions as shown in the above pic ar rather cool. Even cooler than the water-based disrupters are the "percussion-actuated nonelectric disrupters" coming out of Sandia National Labs. From the news release ...

"Although details about how the PAN Disrupter works cannot be divulged for security reasons, the device precisely interrupts a bomb?s internal gadgetry quickly, before the bomb can detonate, and remotely, with human bomb specialists a safe distance away."

At least for now we can only speculate as to how exactly this might work.

Even beter with Serpentine Arms

Bomb bot in a tight squeeze? Trying to edge around the car battery and into position around a particularly nasty car bomb? Well I'd outfit the bomb bot with a serpentine arm ...

... In other words, why have some guy standing there in a bomb suit positioning the disruptor when "Schmoopie" can do it for you! There are some neat movies here showing the serpentine bot in action.

Should be be concerned about bots? I'd say, "not right now" at least. They seem to be helping us out nicely and hopefully anything like The Matrix is a long way off.

killdashnine@zzz.com.ru

Bomb Disposal Squad Humor

This was sent to me by Ioan Lupu as a more relevant "pic of the week" Thanks Ioan!

Oil & Gas

Odds are very good that the electricity powering your computer came from a generator powered by coal, oil, or natural gas - Clean Energy. Everything we do is touched by the oil and gas industry. In fact if you tried to avoid anything touched by oil, you'd be naked with nothing to do (well except - Porn). You are 'Hydrocarbon Man'.

It's an old industry, dating back to 1800 with the discovery and use of 'mineral oil' or kerosene. Stalin got his taste for Communism, fighting capitalists (the Nobels in fact) in the Baku oil fields. (See Rise of Communism.) Oil then fueled the Communist Revolution, as capitalists could not refuse their supply, nor could they have the communists flood their carefully controlled markets.

At the end of the last two world wars the losers had no oil.

The United States talks of separation of church and state, but it would be far harder to separate oil and state. Oil drives western civilization. Oil is government.

Where does it come from?

Dead dinosaurs and plants create oil. In general oil forms and is trapped under a salt dome preventing it from reaching the surface. Geophysical surveys strive to identify not just the oil, but the stone dome above it.

Theses days it is typically found about 1000-1500 meters underground. In the early days oil was found by identifying stone domes on the surface of the land. However the dome also caused considerable confusion for early prospectors since it would deflect some drill bits away. Neighbors could drill shallow wells and hit oil, while yours would just seem to go on and on - Thus was born the art of surveying a well.

Surveyors would drop a pendulum and photographic plate down the well. A light in the pendulum would periodically shine onto the plate indicating how vertical the well was. You'd then pull this device up and see how you were doing. This type of equipment is still in use today.

How do we get to it?

Drilling is a lot more complicated these days. All wells start with a large concrete plug topped with a blow out protection valve. Contrary to popular belief, oil blowing out of your well is not cause for celebration. The riggers do not dance about, arm in arm in celebration.

'Blowouts' are caused by the immense pressures on the reservoir that has just been tapped. If the reservoir drains too quickly, the formation will collapse, and prevent any further oil from coming out of the well. Over the long run a slower pace of extraction allows more oil to be drained from the reservoir and surrounding formation. The other potential side effect is the release of Hydrogen Sulfide (H2S, or Sour Gas). Hydrogen Sulfide is amazingly poisonous, and is rated by the UN the same as Mustard Gas and Chlorine Gas. (Almost all Iraqi oil wells are sour by the way.)

Consider this, at 10PPM (Parts per Million) you smell rotten eggs, and start to suffer from oxygen asphyxiation, at 100PPM you lose your sense of smell, suffer from oxygen asphyxiation, and get a bad headache, at 500PPM you fall down and will die in a few minutes. You cannot hold your breath efficiently enough to keep this stuff out and its effects are instantaneous. It's highly corrosive, eating through stainless steel over time, and it readily dissolves into water (from which it can later be released).

Pipes

Pipe basically comes in two flavors, sections or stands of 12-meter pipes (weight, 2000 lbs each). These sections of pipe need to be attached end-to-end, and tightened (torqued) to 10,000 PSI. Tightening and loosening these sections is basically what the riggers spend most of there time doing. It's very dangerous. You can tell how many years a guy has been at a rig by how many fingers he is missing (if they didn't lose anything more important!).

The other flavor of pipe is Coil. Coil pipes are massive long steel pipes that are uncoiled as the rig drills. Since they don't need to be torqued they are very fast at drilling, however they cannot be steered. (See Government Coil Tube Description.)

Drills

Drilling has changed drastically over the last 100 years. In the old days, the drill bit was dropped up and down to break up the rock, and then another attachment (called a pail - duh) was used to scoop up the rocks. This only worked for vertical wells for which the rock dome did not deflect the drill bit. (These days the vast majority of wells are vertical.)

The typical drill is powered by mud slurry forced down the well driving what is known as a mud motor. (The bane of all down hole equipment is of course cavitation caused by excessive flow rates. Cavitation will dissolve any substance until it is nothing.)

These days the drill is known as a Mud Motor. (See Baker Hughes Mud Motor Manual.) The pressure differential through the mud motor imparts the rotation on the drill bit. The remaining slurry shoots through like a water knife.

Drill bits have the capability of having a slight angle on them such that they do not drill in a straight line. Thus we have steering or directional drilling. (Think about this in your head.

If the drill can't go in a straight line, and can in fact only cut with a 1-5 degree arc, then steering is accomplished by the steering the pipe from the surface. 'Straight holes' are more like spirals through the ground.) All this steered drilling still doesn?t help us if we don?t know where the drill is. The oil industry uses two techniques to determine where the well is. One technique is to survey the well after the fact. The other is to Monitor or Log While Drilling (MWD\LWD).

There are really only two common ways to communicate with the drill (a.k.a. Bottom Hole Assembly, or BHA) in use today. The most common is the Mud Pulser, and the next most common is Electro-Magnetic Pulse. (See Common Telemetry Techniques.)

Mud Pulser

Mud Pulsers have been around for a good 30 years. The idea is to block up the pipe a bit such that a surface system can detect a change in pressure. (You can talk down to the BHA the same way.)

Cutting edge in this field is 1 bit per second, and under the right conditions and coding scheme you can get to a blazing 2 baud! Mud Pulsers only work with uncompressible fluids (no air bubbles) and stone formations that don?t leak. Mud Pulsers are vulnerable to getting jammed with debris from the mud slurry, and are almost always melted down by cavitation.

When the valve is closed the surface system can sense an increase in backflow pressure from the mud pulser.

Electro-Magnetic Pulse

The earliest patents in the field date back to1920. The idea is to electrically isolate the end of the drill string (BHA) from the rest, and then use the BHA as an antenna. Earth formations typically have a pass band of less than 12 Hz. Cutting Edge with Electromagnetic Pulsers is 12 baud and must frequently operate in conditions of 6db SNR.

The keys to this technology are the efficiency of the electronics, and the mechanics of the BHA isolator. The isolator must not conduct, must withstand a hugely abrasive environment, and a good 10,000PSI of torque.

Relatively few companies are capable of fielding this technology.

Acoustic

The latest technology to hit the scene is being jointly delivered by Extreme Engineering (yeah and what kind of puny engineering do YOU do? Huh?) and Sandia National Laboratories. The idea behind acoustic technology is generate vibrations translationally along the drill string to the surface. The acoustic pass band for this technology is related to the speed of sound through steel, and the lengths of the pipes involved. Bandwidth is quite high, but the so are the design challenges (that?s why they need Extreme Engineers).

Wire Line

Sounds simple, but its not. Think about how you feed a wire down to a mud motor. Now, figure out how to add different sections of pipe with a continuous chunk of wire running through. Sounds like a brainteaser, right? Consider that the mud is in fact an abrasive substance, so your wire needs to be armored. And finally, you?re still likely to suffer from some cavitation over the surface of the cable. Here?s one solution if you?re feeling rich... (You?d need to throw out $2,000,000 of old pipe, and replace it with $10,000,000 of IntelliPipe.)

On the plus side, you don?t need batteries, and wires can support high data rates.

Sensors

What exactly do they sense down there? Well, there are basically 5 sensors in use today; Gravitometers, Magnetometers, Pressure Sensors, Resitivity sensors, and Gamma sensors. Only Gravitometers and Magnetometers are used for orienting a drill string. (Gravitometers work best when they are vertical, while magnetometers work best when they are horizontal. Sample Orientation Sensor)

From this, it is possible to see where the drill is going. To figure out where it is, you need to iteratively calculate back from where you started.

So that?s how you dig a hole.

Special thanks to Douglas Bush for this article!