System and method for deduplicating perforating-gun initiator-circuit addresses

Abstract

A stack of addressable perforating guns with preassigned addresses may be configured for operation by identifying any duplicate addresses in the stack and deduplicating the addresses by assigning new addresses to at least a subset of any guns having the same address until each gun in the stack has an address unique in the stack.

The invention claimed is: 
     
         1 . A perforating system comprising:
 (a) a first perforating gun having an addressable circuit with a preassigned first-gun address;   (b) at least one additional perforating gun, each additional perforating gun having an addressable circuit with a preassigned additional-gun address;   (c) a control system comprising a processor configured to deduplicate the additional-gun addresses.   
     
     
         2 . The perforating system of  claim 1  wherein the control-system processor is configured to deduplicate the addresses of the additional perforating guns by:
 (a) communicating with the first perforating gun to determine and record the first-gun address; and 
 (b) for each additional perforating gun: communicating with the additional perforating gun to determine and record its additional-gun address, determining whether this additional-gun address is in the set of addresses comprising the first-gun address and any previously recorded additional-gun addresses, and, if so, assigning and recording a new additional-gun address for the additional perforating gun. 
 
     
     
         3 . The perforating system of  claim 1  wherein the control-system processor is configured to deduplicate the addresses of the additional perforating guns by:
 (a) communicating with the first perforating gun to determine and record the first-gun address; 
 (b) for each additional perforating gun: communicating with the additional perforating gun to determine and record its additional-gun address; 
 (c) determining whether there are any duplicate addresses in the set of addresses comprising the first-gun address and the additional-gun addresses; and 
 (d) assigning and recording a new additional-gun address for at least a subset of the additional guns that have a duplicate address so that each additional-gun has an additional-gun address that is distinct from all other additional-gun addresses and from the first-gun address. 
 
     
     
         4 . The system of  claim 1  wherein the control-system processor is configured to randomly assign an available address to at least one of the additional perforating guns in order to deduplicate the additional-gun addresses. 
     
     
         5 . A method for operating a perforating system comprising a first perforating gun and at least one additional perforating gun, the method comprising:
 (a) reading and recording a first-gun address associated with the first perforating gun;   (b) for each additional perforating gun, reading and recording an additional-gun address associated with the additional perforating gun;   (c) deduplicating the additional-gun addresses.   
     
     
         6 . The method of  claim 5  wherein the step of deduplicating is performed sequentially on a gun-by-gun basis as each additional-gun address is read and before proceeding to read and record the next additional-gun address. 
     
     
         7 . The method of  claim 5  wherein the step of deduplication is performed after the first-gun address and all the additional-gun addresses have been read and recorded. 
     
     
         8 . The method of  claim 5  wherein the deduplicating step includes assigning and recording a new additional-gun address selected randomly from the set of available addresses.