Seismic beamforming

Gholam Azad, Shervin (2012) Seismic beamforming. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

[English] PDF - Accepted Version Available under License - The author retains copyright ownership and moral rights in this thesis. Neither the thesis nor substantial extracts from it may be printed or otherwise reproduced without the author's permission. Download (30MB)

Abstract

The mining industry currently faces decreasing numbers of mineral discoveries at shallow depths. As a result, mining companies are intent on finding new methods to discover deposits which lie deeper (>500 m) and are out of reach of other conventional geophysical techniques. The possibility of adapting seismic techniques to incorporate mineral exploration has recently been considered. The use of seismic beam-forming could potentially significantly diminish exploration costs for deeper targets. An approach to decreasing the cost of the seismic technique is to significantly decrease the source cost by relaxing the imaging requirement of complete azimuthal illumination of the target. In this work, we employ a method to beam-form scattered energy and optimally detect and map geological targets. For each subsurface grid point, we compute a delay and sum operation that is designed to focus diffraction energy, assuming that the point is a candidate for causing a diffraction event. We demonstrate the benefits of this approach by applying it to both synthetic and real seismic data in which targets at different depths are present. Overall, the results obtained from both synthetic and real field data show that seismic beam-forming could be an effective method for locating ore deposits. Successful application of this method could prove successful in reducing exploration costs.

Actions (login required)

View Item