A Shear-Wave Seismic System to Look Ahead of a Tunnel Boring Machine

The Earth’s properties, composition and structure ahead of a tunnel boring machine (TBM) should be mapped for hazard assessment during excavation. We study the use of seismic-exploration techniques for this purpose. We focus on a seismic system for soft soils, where shear waves are better and easier to interpret than compressional waves, as has...

Looking ahead of a tunnel boring machine with 2-D SH full waveform inversion

In the near-surface with unconsolidated soils, shear properties can be well imaged, sometimes better than P-wave properties. To facilitate ground prediction ahead of a tunnel boring machine (TBM), active ‘surveys’ with shear-wave vibrators are carried out during boring. In such surveys, only a few shear-wave vibrators can be placed in front of...

An auxiliary bump functional to overcome cycle skipping in waveform inversion

To overcome the local minima problem in FWI, we propose to use an auxiliary data-domain objective function during inversion. It reduces the data to a simpler form by squaring, followed by blurring to ensure that events that are too far apart can still interact during the inversion. As it effectively replaces seismic arrivals by bumps, we call it...

Parametrization for 2-D SH full waveform inversion

With single-parameter full waveform inversion, estimating the inverse of the Hessian matrix will accelerate the convergence, but is computationally expensive. Therefore, an approximate Hessian, which is easier to compute, is often used. Similarly, in the case of multi-parameter full waveform inversion, the computation of the Hessian terms that...