Monthly Archives: July 2012

Drilling Software: Lost in Translation?

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Literally, being lost in translation happens not only to travelers in foreign countries, but also in our daily lives, where essential meanings are dropped in communication; or in the software development process, in which the specifications might be compromised. That's why it's important to work with Professional Website Translation as such companies can guarantee the quality of their translation.

Drilling software, used by drilling professionals, is rarely developed by drilling engineers. The gap between eventual users and developers is inevitable. We can attempt to minimize it, but we cannot remove it completely, simply because two groups of people speak different languages.

While developers speak computer languages such as VB, C#, etc., drilling engineers speak an operation language. The communication is through meetings, specifications, testing, and so on. It is easier for developers to speak the field language and we have proved this.

One of the translation tools between these languages is visualization, especially 3D. It is hard enough for field engineers to explain what happens downhole. It is equally challenging for developers to express the computer simulated numbers in a meaningful yet easy-to-understand format. The following graph is one of our approaches to show the buckling of a pipe in a well.

Pipe buckling

Quite a few years ago, I visited Japan with a delegate of casing running and cementing experts from Unocal. The Japanese are known for their beautifully arranged dishes, such as bento. But what (pleasantly) surprised me was that the plastic models of dishes or noodle bowls were so real. They could easily fool our eyes. These models were mostly handmade and custom-tailored for restaurants.

Their idea is to really get you interested in the dishes. Dish pictures in the menu help non-Japanese speakers order. Dish models displayed in the restaurant ultimately translate the entire description to a vivid virtual order so that ordering food is as effortless as possible.

Back to our title. 3D visualization is a great help in translating computer language to field language. But if you really want to conquer the world, we have the drilling software (with 5 languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese and Russian) to enable you to do so.

Multi-language drilling software

The Tallest Building & the Deepest Well

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Dubai has several wonders. Among them is the Burj Khalifa: the tallest building in the world (828 m, 165 floors).

Burj Khalifa

Burj Khalifa

It looks like a needle piercing the sky, like a scene from Star Wars. Calling it a landmark would be an understatement. There are more than 1700 high-rises in Dubai. Every building has a different shape. But when compared with Burj Khalifa, other buildings are like chicks and Burj Khalifa is like a huge, elegant crane…

I was in Dubai to teach a cementing software course. I would not miss the opportunity to visit it. The ticket to go up was AED 100 Dhs ($33) if booked on line or AED 400 Dhs if purchased on-site. And you have to select a particular time slot, e.g., 9:30am. The most popular time slots from 4:00pm to 8:00pm are often sold out.

It took the elevator less than 1 minute to rise from the ground to the 124th floor. Visitors can step onto the terrace on the 124th floor and see the world sinking to the bottom.

The World Below

The World Below

I felt like I was on top of the world and wondered what kinds of challenges they had to face to build this dream. I am almost certain that one of them was financial. The tower was originally named Burj Al Dubai. During the late phase, it was renamed Burj Khalifa to honor the UAE President for his injection of much needed money, the critical blood of life, to complete the construction.

This blood of life must have originated from another type of blood: oil, especially in the Middle East.

Talking about the quest for oil and gas, the deepest well ever drilled is Russia’s Kola Superdeep Borehole with the deepest point below the surface (12,262 m or 40,230 ft).

Tallest building and deepest well comparison

Comparison

For the sake of comparison, I put the tallest and deepest points together on this graph.

Doing simple math, we can find that for every 1 meter of the tallest building, we drilled 14.8 meters of rock.

It is much easier to drill a well than build a skyscraper.

Between Me and the Sun is the Umbrella

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Dubai. 1:00pm. 42°C. I finished the software training and planned on heading to the neighboring Mall of the Emirates to eat at an Iranian restaurant for lunch. It was brutal outside: millions of the sun’s rays hit the sandy surface. The scorching heat was a monster engulfing every living creature outside.

The idea hit me that I should get an umbrella. Upon my request, the hotel staff fetched a slim umbrella with a clear plastic film. Looking surprised, I asked, “Is this for rain or the sun?”

“It is specially designed to protect you from the sun,” he explained.

On my way to the mall, under the sun and the clear umbrella, I could not help but laugh at myself: the sole purpose of an umbrella in a city, where any rain would be newsworthy, is probably for the sun. How could I overlook something so obvious?

Maybe the clear plastic was a high-tech material such as ceramic that blocked more UV rays than cloth, while still allowing you the pleasure of viewing your surroundings, just like the window coating on my car. When I did my front side window coating, the shop technician told me that the clear one (not the dark coating) actually blocks more harmful rays.

Suddenly, it did not feel as hot under the umbrella. It might have been the film rejecting the heat or just my wishful thinking. To verify this, I extended my hand and arm outside of the umbrella and pulled them back in. You know what? It felt noticeably different: it was much less irritating when my hand and arm were under the umbrella. I repeated the experiment and was pretty sure about my feeling. I even closed my eyes when doing it.

Upon entering the mall, I collapsed the umbrella. Of course, there was no rainwater forming earthworms on the floor. But I could almost feel millions of heated air molecules falling and bumping around.

Luxurious yet Affordable

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Dubai was such an eye-opening experience for me. People elsewhere may have to cut down trees to build a concrete forest, while Dubai is transforming the desert into vertical cities. I stayed in a new business area called Al Barsha. A couple of years ago, it had nothing but sand. Now, the shining glass buildings are like mushrooms, no, actually more like bamboo reaching up to the sky.

My hotel was close to the new mall (Mall of the Emirates). Can you believe that they have an indoor ski inside called Ski Dubai?!

Ski Dubai from outside

Figure 2: Ski Dubai from outside

 

Inside Ski Dubai

Figure 3: Inside Ski Dubai

My daughter and I had a good time in this first indoor ski resort in the Middle East. The full day access to the snow park was AED 130 Dhs (US $36) and the 2-hour ski pass was AED 180 Dhs (US $50). Although high for entertainment expenses, it is affordable for ski fanatics: they do not need to fly to snowy countries to ski.

The landmark of Dubai is Burj Al Arab, one of the most luxurious hotels in the world, as shown in the first picture. Its rates start from AED 5000 Dhs (US $1389) per night.

But there are many decent hotels with prices below US $200/night.

Luxurious yet affordable: that is Dubai. That is also Dr. DE, our drilling engineering toolbox software.

Eureka

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According to legend, the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes was hired by the king to determine if a crown is pure gold or just covered by gold. Legend says that while taking a bath, Archimedes suddenly realized that by measuring the amount of water displaced by an object (crown), one can calculate its density, and hence its purity.  In his excitement, he jumped our of the tub, ran through the streets toward the palace, wet and naked, shouting “Eureka!” (“I have found it” in Greek).  He eventually developed Archimedes' principle, which states elegantly: Buoyancy = weight of displaced fluid.

The story becomes legend because it reveals an often-overlooked aspect of problem solving: remove the safeguard of hard thinking and let the unexpected wisdom of intuition drive, one might be stricken by the light of sudden enlightenment.

While it is challenging to define the intuition, we know that they not only exist, but sometime play important roles in our successful projects, and many other efforts. Some of the attributes of intuition include: collective consciousness, egoless, stressless state of mind allowing free thinking, gift from a higher power, etc.

Intuition and reason, seemly opposing forces, are actually complementary to each other.  We nurture our instinct with all information available, all our intellectual efforts and let it blossom. We walk with 2 legs: intuition and reason, of them I do not know which is left or right.

We live in a wired world of hardware, software and emotion. We may not be software developers by profession, but almost all of us, at one point or another, are users of some software. We all experience the WOW moment when we see clever design or pleasantly surprised features, but more often than not, we sigh with complain: “Why do not they design better?!”

Those under-delivered software packages lack one or both of intuition and reason.  Software is a distance dialog between developers and users, who most likely never meet each other. But the needs of users are met by developers through intuition and intelligent efforts. Users acquire advanced features. Developers have to switch roles of programmers and users (to design how they use the eventual software) to conduct a successful remote “conversation”.

Making simple things complicated is easy, because one does not have to think hard; while making complicated tasks as simple as Google search or Archimedes' principle is very difficulty and requires strong intuition. That is art!

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” Leonardo da Vinci said 500 years ago. Let all of us, users and developers, embrace simplicity in life and work, and have more “Eureka!” moments!