Elimination of higher modes in dispersive in‐seam multimode Love waves

Abstract

A deterministic pure phase shift filter (PPSF) is developed to extract the fundamental mode from multimode surface Love waves. Because of different phase velocities of modes and hence different phase traveltimes for a fixed travel distance between source and receiver, the deterministic PPSF can be computed, provided that the dispersion relation of the medium is estimated from the existing transmission data. The process consists of (a) applying the deterministic PPSF to the multimode wave (this step of the filtering process results in a time series in which the amplitudes of the fundamental mode appear at acausal times and the amplitudes of higher modes appear at causal times); (b) setting amplitude values equal to zero for positive times; (c) applying the inverse PPSF to the filtered signal. By using such a deterministic PPSF process, the higher modes almost disappear. The method is applied to synthetic multimode data computed by the normal‐mode summation method.