Quaternion-based anisotropic inversion for flexural waves in horizontal transverse isotropic formations with unmatched sources: A synthetic example

Abstract

The anisotropy of elastic waves has been widely used to obtain structural information on formations in geosciences research. Flexural wave splitting is generally applied to evaluate anisotropy with geophysical inversion methods. Cross-dipole sonic logging has been widely used for anisotropic inversions in horizontal transverse isotropic formations. Traditional methods assume that fast and slow flexural waves are similar in shape and are not dispersive and that the radiation characteristics of the two orthogonal dipole sources are identical. The two above assumptions cannot be satisfied in field conditions. Therefore, the methods used in anisotropy inversion based on these assumptions will lead to inaccurate results. The introduction of the amplitude ratio (AR), the ratio of slow to fast flexural waves, which is not dependent on the source type, can eliminate the wave-shape assumption. Two data sets from orthogonally oriented receivers can be constructed as a quaternion array. Fast and slow flexural waves are the two main incident waves, and other arrivals such as P-waves can be taken as noise. The AR and a quaternion multiple signal classification algorithm are used to demonstrate how to improve the anisotropic inversion and avoid these assumptions. Compared with the traditional method, the new method presents better inversion results for the synthetic example with two different sources. We have determined that the inversion residual from the new objective function can be used to indicate the inversion quality.