Customer Solutions

LabVIEW, PXI, and SCXI Multicomputer System for Remote Drill-Site Monitoring

Author(s):

Brian E. Moyer, Data Science Automation

Industry:

Oil and Gas/ Refining/ Chemicals

Product:

LabVIEW, PXI/CompactPCI, Signal Conditioning

The Challenge:

Monitoring oil well drill sites in very harsh, desolate locations worldwide.

The Solution:

Creating a rugged, portable LabVIEW-based system running on a National Instruments PXI industrialized computer connected to an SCXI chassis for conditioning analog, counter, and timer inputs.

At their clients’ oil field locations, ECD Solutions must reliably monitor various process sensors, including pressures and temperatures, digital counters and frequency inputs, and higher rate accelerometer signals associated with the drilling process. This critical system provides site engineers with drilling performance feedback necessary to predict lubrication requirements and make frequent cost-saving decisions.
Data Science Automation, Inc. (Pittsburgh, PA), a full service software and systems engineering firm with offices in four U.S. cities, was contracted to supply the data acquisition, analysis, and presentation system. The system monitors up to 24 system inputs and combines these to form 17 critical process variables for a sophisticated gas and oil well drill site monitoring system. The customized software offers flexible real-time and historical trending, statistical analysis, and automated reporting features. It provides an intuitive interface for configuring both data acquisition parameters (input channels, scaling information, alarm monitoring, etc.) and report parameters (plot styles, alarm monitoring, process variable descriptions, and combinations). The networked system includes data and setup parameter sharing between the primary data server and two remote computers, an extensive relational database application, and redundancy to guard against system failure. For the system to survive in the extremely harsh and desolate conditions, we incorporated all this functionality into a rugged system design that we can easily transport to field locations worldwide.

System Configuration
Rugged, robust, portable, and expandable are the keywords that helped us select a high-speed, Intel-based PXI industrial computer, an instrumentation-class A/D converter, a USER SOLUTIONS 12-slot SCXI signal conditioning chassis, and TBX terminal blocks for three analog input modules, one custom counter module, and one custom frequency input module. We installed this combination of National Instruments hardware, 19 in. rack-mounted monitor, industrial-strength keyboard, and network router within two NEMA 12 enclosures for protection. As downtime can result in hundreds of thousands of dollars lost per day, flexibility and redundancy were critical design requirements. We chose the TBX terminal blocks to simplify changing hardware connections in the field and the SCXI modules for expandability and availability of backup channels to overcome unforeseen I/O failures.

In addition to the ease with which you can create fully customizable user interfaces, we chose the LabVIEW graphical programming language because of its simplicity and the full-featured functionality of its integral utilities for communicating with data and image acquisition hardware, relational databases, and other computers.

The primary software for this project resides on the backbone PXI computer. A successful login leads the user to a menu-driven interface with setup, data collection, real-time display, and historical display options. Default data collection and process variable display parameters are initially retrieved from a database file. Using flexible setup screens, you can modify these parameters prior to any run, and during a run if changes in hardware connections are required. To ensure reliable operation, several methods exist to verify that the hardware and software are communicating properly.

Once a drilling run or data collection session starts, you have access to five different interfaces for real-time data trending. The system uses circular buffering to store the most recent 12 hours worth of data acquired at 1 Hz. These five trending interfaces provide complete flexibility in how real-time data is displayed and printed, including:

• Customized grouping of trend items
• Vertical strip chart plots
• Showing and hiding of alarm limits on plots
• Multiple y-axis options

We designed this application to run continuously for several days, weeks, or even months. To reduce the required storage space, data is reduced to one point per minute and stored to a binary file on the primary computer. LabVIEW communicates with a comprehensive Microsoft Access database using the National Instruments SQL Toolkit to manage these files, to store system and drill site configuration parameters, and to access lookup tables for process variable calculations. Every twelve hours during a run, a fully customizable plot and an optional statistical summary table are automatically sent to a printer and a new historical binary data file is created.

Conclusion
Benefits of this system include fully customizable displays for both real-time and historical trends; optional process variable and/or sensor alarm monitoring; reliable and easily configurable data acquisition; rugged, redundant, and expandable hardware; seamless data sharing between networked computers; and a comprehensive database application for merging, monitoring, and comparing drill site performances worldwide. This solution offers ECD Solutions a state-of-the- art hardware and software platform that permits them and their clients to continue to leverage from the overwhelming trend toward computer-based measurement and automation systems long into the future.

For more information, contact:

 Brian Moyer

Senior Automation Engineer

\Data Science Automation, Inc.

400 Southpointe Plaza, Suite 210

Canonsburg, PA 15317

Tel: (724) 745-8400

Fax: (724) 745-8461

E-mail: bem@dsautomation.com

361201a1.pdf

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