Automated Locating Mining-Induced Microseismicity without Arrival Picking by Weighted STA/LTA Traces Stacking

Abstract

The automatic location of the microseismic source is still a challenging endeavor in the microseismic field. Due to the complexity of the mining environment, the microseismic records collected by different channels vary, and generally have a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Therefore, the automatic location algorithm is required to be robust and accurate. For microseismic records with low SNR, the stack-based method does not need to pick arrival, thus avoiding the large location error caused by picking arrival. However, the traditional stack-based method does not consider the influence of the waveform quality of different stations, which can bring some errors to the location result. In this paper, in order to improve the location accuracy of the traditional stack-based method, we propose a method for weighted STA/LTA traces stacking. First, we established evaluation indicators of waveform quality based on microseismic records. Then, the STA/LTA traces are given weight to stack according to the evaluation indicators. Finally, the maximum value of the stacking function is solved in the four-dimensional space to obtain the source coordinates. In the process of calculation, we use the weighted differential evolution (WDE) optimal algorithm instead of the full grid search method, which greatly improves the calculation efficiency. The blasting experiment and engineering application show that the proposed method is stable and effective, and the location accuracy is higher than the traditional stack-based method and the arrival-based method.