Argus Control System - Data Handling System.

ARGUS CONTROL SYSTEM FOR MARINE SEISMIC ACQUISITION

Malaysia | Poland | Philippines

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The main purposes of the Argus system are : -

1) Emulate an ideal tape drive, thus shielding the acquisition system from tape failures that traditionally have caused the acquisition system to lose data or crash. Argus stores the captured data directly to a high-performance RAID system (high speed/high capacity disk system).

2) Increase shooting speed by not being limited by the write performance of the tape drives.

3) Dual recording. No additional, expensive, proprietary, acquisition system components required.

4) Make data available for real time access by onboard processing.

5) Instrument and seismic quality control.

6) Automatic tape labelling.

7) WEB based reporting intended for onshore personnel.

What is Argus ?

A Quality Control and Data Handling System

for Marine Seismic Acquisition

Captures data from SCSI tape output
Emulates an ideal tape drive. Maximizes throughput.
Stores data to high capacity disk RAID system
Performs robust recording of data to tape (dual recording)
Provides direct real-time access to data for production processing
Real time monitoring, analysis, and graphics displays
Generates field reports/logs
Generates tape labels automatically

Background

The product is based on the knowledge and experience we gained from working for different seismic companies over several years.

The Argus system is not an acquisition system. Argus is meant to boost the performance of the major 3D marine acquisition systems, the Syntrak system of Sercel and the MSX from Input/Output. These are large systems containing proprietary purpose built components, and represent a large investment for most marine 3D contractors.

As these systems are increasingly being pushed to the technical limits today, Argus represents an inexpensive method of adding stability and functionality, thus protecting the contractors’ investments by extending the lifetime of the equipment by non-intrusive methods.

We believe that our concept represents something unique in this industry. From our experience in developing cost effective in-house systems, we have learned that by implementing in software what has traditionally been handled by purpose built stacks of VME cards, development costs are being kept at a minimum, while the versatility and maintainability has been maximised.

By running our software on standard commercial computers, we have been able to freely choose the right hardware to solve the given task at all times. If we could have interfaced the seismic cables directly into our computer, we could, by adapting our software, taken over the role of the 3D marine acquisition systems. This has until now been impossible, mostly due to the streamer transmission protocols which are proprietary and not publicly available.

Display Shots:-

Raw Data Display

This is a typical shot display where the raw data are displayed in one window (left) and the same data in another window with 8 Hz low cut filter applied. The filters are user configurable.

click image to enlarge

Normally the view is rotated over the streamers from shot to shot. One can lock the view on one streamer or view previous shots.

RMS Values Display

click image to enlarge

This display shows the RMS values over all streamers for a number of shots. It updates automatically. One can configure a target window, f.ex. at the end of the records like here. In this example, we can see that the noise level is higher at the front of the streamers and staying stable for about 50 shots. Normally, the RMS level for the last 100 shots are displayed.

Streamer Display

click image to enlarge

This display shows the depth along all streamers for many shots. Color coding can be set for different streamer target depths. White color means on target, while red is too deep and blue is too shallow. Using the Syntrak, we can identify a transmission fault by a blue line crossing a whole streamer or like in this picture a misfire, or rather three misfires, represented by blue lines across all streamers.