Software interfaces a gravity meter and GPS receiver simultaneously, parsing and filtering the data and sending it to the correct locations in a Excel spreadsheet
Austin Exploration conducts GPS-based high-resolution land and marine gravity and magnetic surveys throughout the world.
Its surveys and associated interpretations have proven to be invaluable to the oil and gas industries worldwide.
Austin Exploration's surveys are also beneficial to the mining industry in its search for gold, silver, iron, zinc, lead and diamonds.
To perform underwater gravity surveys and locate oil and gas beneath the floor of the ocean, Austin Exploration uses a ship equipped with advanced instrumentation to check below the ocean floor for minute differences in the earth's gravitational field.
These indicate a change in density in the subsurface, and correspondingly, the presence of various structures including salt domes, anticlines (folds with layers of sedimentary rock sloping downward on both sides from a common crest), reefs, etc.
By rigorously analysing these changes in gravitational field, structures are precisely located implying the existence of oil fields.
Austin Exploration makes use of the most advanced marine surveying instrumentation including Digital Marine gravity meters and GPS receivers.
Since both instruments offer RS232 output, they are easily connected directly to a PC with a serial cable.
Connecting the instruments to a PC offers complete automation of the survey data.
The gravity information is recorded along with the GPS-based navigational information to accurately map density changes in the substructure beneath the ocean floor.
To accomplish this the gravity information is fed into the PC via serial port two while a GPS receiver is hooked up to serial port three.
The GPS receiver accurately tracks the ship's location relative to satellites in orbit around the earth.
Hence exact location and gravity information must be simultaneously plotted into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.
This is achieved using the WinWedge for Windows Pro (or WinWedge Pro). This software interfaces both the gravity meter and the GPS receiver simultaneously and parses and filters the data and sends it to the correct locations in a Excel spreadsheet.
The spreadsheet then automatically graphs the information.
At present both these instruments are connected to a Pentium 100 with 16 megabytes of Ram running Windows 95.
The researchers are considering moving to Windows NT in the future.
They are using an add-in four-channel serial port board to allow for connection to additional serial ports.
Before they discovered WinWedge, researchers at Austin Exploration were using ProComm to simply dump the incoming serial data from the navigation equipment to a disk file.
WinWedge allowed them more control over parsing, filtering and formatting their serial data and sending it in real time to their Excel spreadsheet.
WinWedge also allowed them to collect data simultaneously from different instruments on different serial ports.
The digital marine gravity meters output binary serial data that is converted to decimal in the WinWedge before it is transferred to Excel.
The GPS Receiver transmits serial Ascii data.
As this is already decimal form, it can be easily transferred by WinWedge into Excel.
The results, which are collected in Excel in real time, help define subsurface structures believed to be prospective hydrocarbon accumulations (oil).
Automating the collection of the survey data provides 100% accuracy and quality control of the data while at sea.
WinWedge is supplied and supported in the UK and Ireland by Adept Scientific.
