Ground vibrations due to seismic detonation in oil exploration

Abstract

AbstractPrevious works on this subject deal mainly with establishing an empirical relationship between the extent of the vibration at the building site (measured by the peak particle velocity), the distance of the building from the explosive, the energy content of the explosive and the frequency of detonating the explosives. These works are mainly limited to cases where the explosives are placed on the surface. However, the practical case requires that the explosive is considered to be buried, either on the sea‐bed in offshore operations or underground in land explorations. This practical case has hitherto received little attention.The present work records an empirical relation based on field tests in Mid‐Western and Rivers States of Nigeria. The depth of the buried explosive is now introduced as an additional parameter and the empirical relation shows its effect, along with the above parameters, on the extent of vibrations at the surface. An interesting, and rather unexpected, stationary point is consistently observed in the variation of peak particle velocity at the surface as the depth of the buried explosive increases while other parameters are kept constant.