Locating Mine Microseismic Events in a 3D Velocity Model through the Gaussian Beam Reverse-Time Migration Technique

Microseismic (MS) source location is a fundamental and critical task in mine MS monitoring. The traditional ray tracing-based location method can be easily affected by many factors, such as multi-ray path effects, waveform focusing and defocusing of wavefield propagation, and low picking precision of seismic phase arrival. By contrast, the Gaussian beam reverse-time migration (GBRTM) location method can effectively and correctly model the influences of multi-path effects and wavefield focusing and defocusing in complex 3D media, and it takes advantages of the maximum energy focusing point as the source location with the autocorrelation imaging condition, which drastically reduces the requirements of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and picking accuracy of P-wave arrival. The Gaussian beam technique has been successfully applied in locating natural earthquake events and hydraulic fracturing-induced MS events in one-dimensional (1D) or simple two-dimensional (2D) velocity models. The novelty of this study is that we attempted to introduce the GBRTM technique into a mine MS event location application and considered utilizing a high-resolution tomographic 3D velocity model for wavefield back propagation. Firstly, in the synthetic test, the GBRTM location results using the correct 2D velocity model and different homogeneous velocity models are compared to show the importance of velocity model accuracy. Then, it was applied and verified by eight location premeasured blasting events. The synthetic results show that the spectrum characteristics of the recorded blasting waveforms are more complicated than those generated by the ideal Ricker wavelet, which provides a pragmatic way to evaluate the effectiveness and robustness of the MS event location method. The GBRTM location method does not need a highly accurate picking of phase arrival, just a simple detection criterion that the first arrival waveform can meet the windowing requirements of wavefield back propagation, which is beneficial for highly accurate and automatic MS event location. The GBRTM location accuracy using an appropriate 3D velocity model is much higher than that of using a homogeneous or 1D velocity model, emphasizing that a high-resolution velocity model is very critical to the GBRTM location method. The average location error of the GBRTM location method for the eight blasting events is just 17.0 m, which is better than that of the ray tracing method using the same 3D velocity model (26.2 m).

Simulation study of a chaotic cavity transducer based virtual phased array used for focusing in the bulk of a solid material

In acoustic and ultrasonic non-destructive testing techniques, it is sometimes beneficial to concentrate sound energy at a chosen location in space and at a specific instance in time, for example to improve the signal-to-noise ratio or activate the nonlinearity of damage features. Time Reversal (TR) techniques, taking advantage of the reversible character of the wave equation, are particularly suited to focus ultrasonic waves in time and space. The characteristics of the energy focusing in solid media using principles of time reversed acoustics are highly influenced by the nature and dimensions of the medium, the number of transducers and the length of the received signals. Usually, a large number of transducers enclosing the domain of interest is needed to improve the quality of the focusing. However, in the case of highly reverberant media, the number of transducers can be reduced to only one (single-channel TR). For focusing in a non-reverberant medium, which is impossible when using only one source, an adaptation of the single-channel reciprocal TR procedure has been recently suggested by means of a Chaotic Cavity Transducer (CCT), a single element transducer glued on a cavity of chaotic shape. In this paper, a CCT is used to focus elastic energy, at different times, in different points along a predefined line on the upper surface of a thick solid sample. Doing so, all focusing points can act as a virtual phased array transducer, allowing to focus in any point along the depth direction of the sample. This is impossible using conventional reciprocal TR, as you need to have access to all points in the bulk of the material for detecting signals to be used in the TR process. To asses and provide a better understanding of this concept, a numerical study has been developed, allowing to verify the basic concepts of the virtual phased array and to illustrate multi-component time reversal focusing in the bulk of a solid material.