About

Dipl.-Ing. Clemens Hinz

in deutschClemens

Clemens Hinz is founder and managing director of HINZ Messtechnik GmbH, an engineering company focused on development, consulting, assembly, and repair of geophysical electronics.

Under Clemens’ leadership HINZ Messtechnik develops borehole tools and controllers, and upgrades existing customer systems with state-of-the-art electronics. This includes hydrophones and geophones for depths up to 2000 m, as well as analog and digital logging tools like Flowmeter, Gamma, Gamma-Gamma, FEL, Sal-Temp, and Direction/Inclination. State-of-the-art 24-bit AD converters and well adapted microcontrollers or digital signal processors are used.

Before his time at HINZ Messtechnik, Clemens was project manager at Deutsche Montan Technologie in Essen, Germany, for 28 years and responsible for tool development of geophysical logging devices and global marketing.

Already in 1980, Clemens was the leading project engineer for the development of the world’s first digital acoustical Televiewer, a borehole sonde creating an image of the inner borehole wall using a rotating ultrasonic head. The system was revolutionary at that time and consisted of a digital sonde with digital data transmission and processor controlled uphole software for logging and representation of field data on digital color  imaging systems and grayscale plotters.

As field engineer Clemens led custom surveys world wide, e.g. in Germany, France, USA, Switzerland, and Sweden. Notable surveys include the crystalline granite surveys of the NAGRA, geothermal and waste storage wells in salt mines like Asse and Gorleben, Germany, as well as coal exploration wells of the German hard coal industry.

During multiple research visits at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, Clemens led the high-temperature system upgrade for the “Hot Dry Rock Geothermal Energy Program”.

In the mid Eighties, Clemens developed and built the explosion-protected “Rotating Gamma Sonde” for the research in seam-guided drillings – a completely autonomous tool with explosion protected  electronics conducting radioactive measurements based on movement.

In the early Nineties, Clemens invented the patented “Shuttle” survey method: an autonomous memory logging tool that is flushed down inside of a HQ-coring drill pipe. Measurements were taken by retracting the whole drill string. This method worked ideally in heavily deviated and horizontal wells. The extremely reliable Coal Combi Shuttle for comprehensive surveying of coal seams, the explosion protected NQ Gamma Shuttle, and the Orientation Shuttle were the most successful products in the portfolio and are still in use in survey fields worldwide today.

Clemens received his Diploma in Electrical Engineering/Telecommunications Engineering from University of Applied Sciences in Bochum, Germany in 1979. He holds several patents in geophysics, e.g., for surveying methods in coring drill pipes, seismic blast sources with sequential igniters, periodic creation of seismic impulses, and inertial navigation tools. He is the author of numerous publications, speeches, and research proposals and papers. His specific areas of expertise include ultrasonic sound, natural gamma radiation, and high-temperature electronics.