Knowledge and Diderot’s Philosophy

There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge... observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.
Denis Diderot (French Philosopher)

Knowledge is defined as a familiarity, awareness or understanding of someone or something, for instance the facts, information, descriptions, or skills, which is acquired through experience or education by perceiving, discovering, or learning of a subject.

In the past century technology went through many advances giving knowledge the opportunity to be more accessible to humanity. For drilling technology, literatures, books, computer programs and other sources have been put together by the brightest minds of drilling professionals; however while this technological know-how has notably driven the industry forward, some individuals are at times overwhelmed by the vast amount of information they receive from different sources of media.

The internet is loaded with drilling engineering information, but this information is scattered around in such a way that can lead to generate different answers to just one question.

The demand has been to create an all-in-one type of information and knowledge base software; a digital toolbox that is quick-to-access, reliable, accurate and interactive among other things. For this, PVI has developed a comprehensive collection of drilling engineering tools in a simple-to-learn and easy-to-use software package - Dr. DE.

Dr. DE - Drilling Engineering Toolbox

The software covers more than 180 functions ranging from the fundamentals of drilling engineering to an advanced well path design and 3D visualization of the wellbore; a resource made for every drilling engineer and technician to get the job done right while also making their engineering and sales efforts easy and efficient.

Dr. DE’s engineering features include:

  • Daily used drilling engineering problems and solutions
  • Extensive and expandable tubular, centralizer and fluid database
  • Survey data up to 5000 points
  • 3D wellbore visualization
  • Intelligent 2D well path design
  • Detailed illustrations
  • Support fraction input of tubular sizes

In the beginning of the article we quoted from Dennis Diderot, a person who strongly believed and promoted that all humans have the right to acquire knowledge because it’s in our nature to learn and that the best way of acquiring it, is through experimentation and the exercise of reasoning. With this in mind is how we developed Dr.DE and how our fellow drilling engineers and technicians can benefit from using it to accomplish their daily tasks.

Drilling Software: Lost in Translation?

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