Seismic source location using the shortest path method based on boundary discretisation scheme for microseismic monitoring in underground mines

Abstract In seismic monitoring at underground mines, the velocity models can be highly complex, particularly in presence of major geological structures. In practice, homogeneous velocity models have been widely used for the purposes of seismic event location in mine seismology. Although heterogeneous velocity models can be incorporated, ray tracing methods need be adopted in these velocity models to compute the travel times for accurately locating seismic events. These methods require each geological unit to be discretised to grids (corner-node or center-node discretisation scheme), which requires large computational capacity. In this research, the Shortest Path Method (SPM)( Moser, 1991) 1 based on a novel Boundary Discretisation Scheme (BDS) is proposed to compute the travel times for seismic event location in heterogeneous velocity models. Only the boundaries of each geological unit are discretised to nodes. The graphical network is constructed by establishing ray paths between discretised nodes on the boundaries of geological units. Dijkstra’s algorithm 2 using heap sorting method 3 is applied to search for the shortest ray paths with the first arrivals for seismic event location. The accuracy and efficiency of this method are validated using a 2D synthetic example. The seismic events recorded during the field monitoring of a dyke-roadway intersected area are located with the proposed BDS-SPM method. The results demonstrate that, compared with the conventional location method using homogeneous velocity models, the proposed method can provide more accurate seismic event locations for microseismic monitoring in underground mines.