Impact of pre-existing fractures on microseismic activity in a synthetic geomechanical model
in: 2016 RING Meeting, ASGA
Abstract
Acoustic emissions are powerful data for characterizing the fracturing activity that takes place
within geological media. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of an efficient method which
would encompass the whole physical process, i.e. from the loading of the medium
to the seismic records. In this paper, we open the path for such a method by developing a
tool that extracts and analyse acoustic emissions from geomechanical simulations performed with
a discrete element method. We discuss the capability of our tool by comparing statistics of our
synthetic seismic activity with classical scaling laws observed on natural seismic catalogs. Analyses
are performed on initially intact and fractured media. Whatever the initial state, we retrieve
consistent spatial correlations of microseismic events and consistent b − values. However, fitting
Omori’s law is more challenging. Moreover, we propose a clustering algorithm for merging several
microseismic events into a single event in order to obtain signals that can be compared with what
we are technically able to measure on field.
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BibTeX Reference
@inproceedings{RUNKJRM60,
abstract = { Acoustic emissions are powerful data for characterizing the fracturing activity that takes place
within geological media. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of an efficient method which
would encompass the whole physical process, i.e. from the loading of the medium
to the seismic records. In this paper, we open the path for such a method by developing a
tool that extracts and analyse acoustic emissions from geomechanical simulations performed with
a discrete element method. We discuss the capability of our tool by comparing statistics of our
synthetic seismic activity with classical scaling laws observed on natural seismic catalogs. Analyses
are performed on initially intact and fractured media. Whatever the initial state, we retrieve
consistent spatial correlations of microseismic events and consistent b − values. However, fitting
Omori’s law is more challenging. Moreover, we propose a clustering algorithm for merging several
microseismic events into a single event in order to obtain signals that can be compared with what
we are technically able to measure on field. },
author = { Bonneau, Francois AND Scholtès, Luc AND Raguenel, Margaux AND Cupillard, Paul },
booktitle = { 2016 RING Meeting },
publisher = { ASGA },
title = { Impact of pre-existing fractures on microseismic activity in a synthetic geomechanical model },
year = { 2016 }
}