Mathematical Model and Simulation of a Pneumatic Apparatus for In-Drilling Alignment of an Inertial Navigation Unit during Horizontal Well Drilling

Conventional methods in horizontal drilling processes incorporate magnetic surveying techniques for determining the position and orientation of the bottom-hole assembly (BHA). Such means result in an increased weight of the drilling assembly, higher cost due to the use of non-magnetic collars necessary for the shielding of the magnetometers, and significant errors in the position of the drilling bit. A fiber-optic gyroscope (FOG) based inertial navigation system (INS) has been proposed as an alternative to magnetometer -based downhole surveying. The utilizing of a tactical-grade FOG based surveying system in the harsh downhole environment has been shown to be theoretically feasible, yielding a significant BHA position error reduction (less than 100m over a 2-h experiment). To limit the growing errors of the INS, an in-drilling alignment (IDA) method for the INS has been proposed. This article aims at describing a simple, pneumatics-based design of the IDA apparatus and its implementation downhole. A mathematical model of the setup is developed and tested with Bloodshed Dev-C++. The simulations demonstrate a simple, low cost and feasible IDA apparatus.

On the Uniform Decay of the Local Energy

It is proved in [1],[2] that in odd dimensional spaces any uniform decay of the local energy implies that it must decay exponentially. We extend this to even dimensional spaces and to more general perturbations (including the transmission problem) showing that any uniform decay of the local energy implies that it must decay like O(t^(−2n) ), t ≫ 1 being the time and n being the space dimension.

Uniform Eberlein Compacta and Uniformly Gâteaux Smooth Norms

* Supported by grants: AV ĈR 101-95-02, GAĈR 201-94-0069 (Czech Republic) and NSERC 7926 (Canada).

Uniform Convergence of the Newton Method for Aubin Continuous Maps

* This work was supported by National Science Foundation grant DMS 9404431.

On the Uniform Convergence of Partial Dunkl Integrals in Besov-Dunkl Spaces

2000 Mathematics Subject Classification: 44A15, 44A35, 46E30

Weak Compatibility and Common Fixed Point Theorems for A-Contractive and E-expansive Maps in Uniform Spaces

2000 Mathematics Subject Classification: 47H10, 54E15.

Weighted ICP Algorithm for Alignment of Stars from Scanned Astronomical Photographic Plates

ACM Computing Classification System (1998): I.2.8, I.2.10, I.5.1, J.2.

Some Inequalities of the Uniform Ergodicity and Strong Stability of Homogeneous Markov Chains

2000 Mathematics Subject Classification: 60J45, 60K25

On Local Uniform Topological Algebras

2000 Mathematics Subject Classification: Primary 46H05, 46H20; Secondary 46M20.

Uniform G-Convexity for Vector-Valued Lp Spaces

2000 Mathematics Subject Classification: 46B20.