IntelleX™ ultra-fast pressure gauge

Product Reference: 0010-0058

The IntelleX™ ultra-fast pressure gauge is a highly flexible, ultra-fast sampling, pressure, temperature and acceleration tool ideal for monitoring extremely fast pressure transients in downhole explosive environments.

The ultra-fast pressure gauge is a fusion of new and proven technologies resulting in a much more flexible tool than standard pressure gauges. The tool is capable of performing traditional slow speed pressure gauge functions as well as ultra fast sampling when required.

The tool can be programmed with any combination of sample rates and ‘trigger events’ with the tool altering the sampling rate depending on the trigger pressure or acceleration. As soon as the tool detects a trigger event it will move to ultra-fast sampling mode within 100μs.

The number of trigger events is limited only by the available tool memory (up to 8 megabytes). For example, the standard tool can record 10 days of standard data at 2 sec/sample with an additional 10 trigger events recording up to 5 seconds of ultra fast data (40,000 samples/sec) per event.

Applications:

Well stimulation

Perforating (for example to confirm dynamic/static underbalance modeling and/or perforation efficiency)

Fracturing

Reservoir monitoring

Well testing

All traditional pressure/temperature surveys

Sample Data

The IntelleX™ ultra-fast pressure gauge can be programmed to collect slow sample data until 'triggered' by an absolute Pressure Threshold or Acceleration Threshold and/or a rate of change of Pressure (delta threshold). The delta pressure threshold is especially useful when it is impossible to signal pressure changes to the gauge, for example when running the gauge during wireline perforating in highly deviated wells.

The following data was collected by the gauge during a North Sea TCP Perforating run with 1200ft of 3-3/8" Perforating guns:

Typical fast perforating event

The gauge can be programmed to collect any number of fast samples. In practice 0.5 seconds is more than enough to capture most transient events during perforating or fracturing:

Typical Fast Perforating Event - Expanded Timescale

The IntelleX™ ultra-fast pressure gauge includes pressure, temperature and two dual axis accelerometers for sampling both Radial and Axial acceleration. All sensors are sampled at the same rate except in Fast Filling Mode where the pressure is sampled and stored at 40,000 samples/sec with all other sensors are sampled at 2,500 samples/sec. The plot below shows the radial acceleration data overlaid on the pressure data:

Typical fast perforating event - pressure and acceleration

The gauge can be programmed to enter Fast Filling Mode on either absolute or 'delta' pressure thresholds, in the case below the gauge was programmed to enter Fast Buffering on an absolute pressure threshold when the firing head was activated. Fast Buffering is where the data is sampled at 40kHz but stored at a user-programmed rate from 10s to 2.5kHz.

The Fast Buffering mode allows the tool to store a buffer of pre-Fast Filling data to ensure no loss of data during the perforating event. 

A second absolute pressure threshold was set to allow the gauge to enter Fast Filling Mode (sampling and storing at 40kHz) at the point of perforation.

Activation via Absolute Pressure Thresholds

The IntelleX™ ultra-fast pressure gauge can be used as a 'standard' strain gauge with the added flexibility of sampling once every 20 minutes to 40,000 samples every second.

This last plot shows the entire data-set from rig up to rig down:

Entire dataset