A seismic vertical vibrator driven by linear synchronous motors

A linear synchronous motor (LSM) is an electric motor that can produce large controllable forces and is therefore suitable as a driving engine for a seismic vibrator. This motor consists of two independent elements, a magnet track and a coil track, allowing practically unlimited motor displacements. This makes the LSM very suitable for expanding...

3-D acquisition geometry analysis: Incorporating information from multiples

Recent advances in survey design have led to conventional common-midpoint-based analysis being replaced by the subsurface-based seismic acquisition analysis and design, with the emphasis on advance techniques of illumination analysis. Amongst them are wave-equation-based seismic illumination analyses such as the so-called focal beam method. The...

Including secondary illumination in seismic acquisition design

A subsurface image obtained from seismic data is influenced by the acquisition geometry, as it contains an acquisition foot-print which can obscure the true reflection response of the subsurface. Hence, the acquisition geometry should be designed in such a way that it allows high-quality images and fulfils the criteria for reservoir...

Effect of noise in blending and deblending

We show that deblended shot records have a better background-related S/N than shot records in unblended surveys. This improvement increases with increasing blending fold and decreasing survey time. An interesting consequence of this property is that blended surveys can be carried out under more severe noise conditions than unblended surveys. It...

Effect of noise in blending and deblending

If simultaneous shooting is carried out by incoherent source arrays, being the condition of blended acquisition, the deblending process generates shot records with a very low residual interference (blending noise). We found, theoretically and numerically, that deblended shot records had a better background-related signal-to-noise ratio than shot...

Robotization in Seismic Acquisition

The amount of sources and detectors in the seismic method follows "Moore’s Law of seismic data acquisition", i.e., it increases approximately by a factor of 10 every 10 years. Therefore automation is unavoidable, leading to robotization of seismic data acquisition. Recently, we introduced a new source concept that replaces today’s complex, local...

Decentralized Blended Acquisition

The concept of blending and deblending is reviewed, making use of traditional and dispersed source arrays. The network concept of distributed blended acquisition is introduced. A million-trace robot system is proposed, illustrating that decentralization may bring about a revolution in the way we acquire seismic data in the future.

Deblending of seismic data

Seismic imaging is one of the most common geophysical techniques for hydrocarbon exploration. Seismic acquisition is a trade-off between economy and quality. In conventional acquisition, the time intervals between successively firing sources are large enough to avoid interference in time. To obtain an efficient survey, the spatial source...

Blended acquisition with dispersed source arrays

Blended source arrays are historically configured with equal source units, such as broadband vibrators (land) and broadband air-gun arrays (marine). I refer to this concept as homogeneous blending. I have proposed to extend the blending concept to inhomogeneous blending, meaning that a blended source array consists of different source units....

Deblending by direct inversion

Deblending of simultaneous-source data is usually considered to be an underdetermined inverse problem, which can be solved by an iterative procedure, assuming additional constraints like sparsity and coherency. By exploiting the fact that seismic data are spatially band-limited, deblending of densely sampled sources can be carried out as a...

Fast multifrequency focal beam analysis for 3D seismic acquisition geometry

A method for the efficient computation of multifrequency focal beams for 3D seismic acquisition geometry analysis has been developed. By computing them for all the frequency components of seismic data, single-frequency focal beams can be extended to multifrequency focal beams. However, this straightforward method involves considerable computer...