Study of the exploration focused on shear waves generated by a dipole source

In this paper, we focused on the generation of the shear wave using a dipole source in water. We made a scaled model of a deep-tow seismic survey using solid material with a set of reflectors and an overlain water layer. Two dilatational sources with the opposite phase to each other are simultaneously excited to form a point force in the water parallel to solid-water interface. The sound field generated by the dipole in water creates a stress field tangential to the solid-water interface so that the shear wave is generated in the solid. For the model, we performed both acoustic experiment and numerical simulations to see both compressional and shear reflection profiles. Numerical simulation indicates that the amplitudes of the S-to-S or S-to-P reflected would be emphasized if we use horizontal seismic sensors on the fluid-solid interface. Although the signal-to-noise ratio of the acoustic experiment is not sufficiently high, we confirmed that shear reflection profile could be produced. It should be noted that shear waves could be produced in water using multipolar sources fired close to the seafloor, and that some improvements to increase shear wave energy more than the compressional wave need to be pursued for practical use of multipolar sources.