– Reduces troubleshooting and operational expense
– Increases production and channel capacity
– Acquired data yields superior images
Z™ designates a group of cable-free nodal acquisition Systems designed to acquire enhanced seismic data at sea and on land, particularly in challenging environments, e.g., dense infrastructure, sub-salt, rugged terrain, urban areas. The current trio of Systems within Fairfield’s Z Technology Group – Z3000® (deep marine), Z700™ (TZ-moderate depth marine) and Z Land™ – has enabled Fairfield to achieve its goal to provide the field operator with a seismic acquisition package that minimizes troubleshooting and operational expense while boosting production and channel capacity.
Each Z Technology Group System is a ‘place and leave’ System having individual self-contained, completely autonomous acquisition and recording units. Once the System’s nodal units have been deployed to their designated locations and activated, they are designed to remain in place unassisted until all necessary seismic reflections from that receiver point for that particular project have been acquired. Each location is revisited only when it is time to retrieve the Z unit.
Historically, cables have been the backbone of the seismic industry. Yet they have been both a blessing and a curse in that the majority of equipment failures in the field are directly related to faulty connectors and cables. Troubleshooting and maintaining these cable systems consumes considerable crew time, slowing production and increasing operational expense.
In contrast, cable-free Z Systems by design eliminate troubleshooting, so operators can devote all their field time and effort to production – meaning faster, less expensive shooting for a data acquisition program. Additionally, in the case of Z Land, the absence of spread cables, cross-line cables, cable transport vehicles and more can mean a 50% or more reduction in total system weight for a typical land crew – and there’s no need to amortize cable costs.
Even though each Z System is mechanically different to accommodate the environment where it’s designed to work, the Systems all share a number of key characteristics:
Autonomous: All Z acquisition units operate independently of one another and independently of any Central Command Unit/Station. There is no communication between any of the components.
Cable-Free Operation: Each Z System is 100 percent free of external cables, as opposed to the commercial “wireless” systems that are interchangeably referred to as cable-free even though they actually contain external cables for sensor inputs and to connect batteries.
Reliability: The absence of any external cables provides the Z units with their extraordinary field reliability. Additionally, every Z unit is comprised of rigid external shells that can endure extreme environments. Shock-mounted internal cages keep the circuitry and systems operating in the most challenging conditions – both natural and cultural
Continuous Recording: Upon deployment, each Z System unit begins acquiring data, recording continuously and locally storing these data onto internal FLASH memory until retrieved. The volume of FLASH memory and the battery life of each Z System have been optimized so the Z units can remain in place long enough to record all the needed seismic reflections for that particular receiver point.
Self Contained: Each Z System unit contains all of the elements and technologies needed to sense, acquire, digitize, filter and store the seismic data. All control circuitry, timing and necessary power are contained within the unit which, once on location, demands no attention from the operator until it is retrieved to download the acquired data.
