Wireless FracBot (Sensor) Nodes: Performance Evaluation of Inductively Coupled Near Field Communication (NFC)

Optimal development of oil and gas fields is significant and necessitates real-time information such as pressure, temperature, and fluid composition. Thus, designing and developing a new technology is extremely necessary to monitor the oil reservoir in real time and extract more oil to satisfy the global demand. One of these technologies is FracBot technology that we are developing to monitor unconventional reservoirs, map hydraulic fractures and measure wellbore parameters. NFC/MI techniques have been considered as an unconventional method to overcome the key challenge of inter-node communication for Wireless Underground Sensor Network (WUSN) in the underground environment. This paper presents the performance evaluation of the FracBot node and the NFC/MI antennas in air, sand and stone media. One of the main results is that the sand and stone media affects the performance of the NFC antennas which eventually degrade the MI signal propagation and reduce the energy transfer. Based on the experimental measurements, the minimum receiver's sensitivity of the current MI-FracBot system must be -70 dBm. The development of hardware and antennas allows us to understand the challenges, improve the electronic sensitivity and optimize the minimum resources necessary to miniaturize the FracBot hardware.