ALPHACORE INC — Department of Energy SBIR Phase I: C56-06a

Description

C56-06a-273584The use of DAS systems is a novel and affordable method to monitor large seismic events such as nuclear explosions, earthquakes, and other underground and underwater seismic activities. However, these target applications cause significantly larger volumes of data than conventional ‘small’ use cases (which gather up to several terabytes of data per day). Therefore, in order to be deployed for a wider range of applications, it is critical to reduce and/or compress the data that is to be transmitted and processed. Alphacore will develop a hardware and software-based solution to reduce transmission data volume from Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) Systems for seismic monitoring applications. Alphacore’s innovative solution that combines traditional lossless compression with innovative neural network based adaptive compression for different use cases will solve this problem. The artificial intelligence-based neural network analyzes temporal and spatial sensor data and compresses adaptively for different use cases therefore reducing the volume of data to be transmitted by ~100x-1000x. Phase I: Objective 1: Use subsurface explosions models and other seismic data models to complete reservoir-computing network for sensor data classification; Objective 2: Design in-memory computing circuit for read-out layer of reservoir-computer; and Objective 3: Analyze the estimated performance improvements (in terms of data compression) of ANEU-INSCAP across applications. The advantages of DAS over traditional point sensors for seismic monitoring applications (including spatial coverage, resolution in both time and space, cost, and deployment flexibility) have encouraged rapid and widespread adoption of this technology across a considerable number of market sectors; e.g., energy, transport, industrial processing, mining, defense, earth sciences and environmental services. DAS is also accredited for the recent accelerated development of Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage, which is perceived as the most critical and effective existing solution against climate change. The data compression mechanism proposed here by Alphacore aims to produce a standardized reduced-size data product for DAS, which is greatly needed by current DAS users and is the obvious next step in advancing DAS to its full potential, especially for real-time characterization of seismic signals and the ability to develop custom alert procedures.