Incorporating geotechnical and geophysical investigations for underground obstruction detection: A case study

Abstract

Determining the location and boundary of underground obstructions and/or anomalies is a common problem and often a great challenge for tunneling and underground construction. In this study, geotechnical investigations (penetration tests and borehole drilling/sampling) and geophysical investigations (surface wave method and cross-hole seismic method) were conducted with the aim of identifying the location and boundary of rock obstructions in Changi East, Singapore. The surface wave method is frequently used in the sites with lateral homogeneity in previous studies, but its application in the sites with rock obstructions is rare. The experimental results of this study indicate that the surface wave method is also able to determine the upper surface of rock obstructions, but difficult to identify the lateral and bottom boundaries of rock obstructions. To improve the precision of detection, the full waveform inversion (FWI) method was used to process the data from the cross-hole seismic survey. The results indicate that the inversion precision of P-wave is higher than that of S-wave. The horizontal and vertical ranges of rock obstructions in the P-wave inversion results are 14–26 m and 7.5–11.0 m respectively, roughly consistent with the results of penetration tests (about 15–25 m) and borehole log (8.85–10.80 m). This result proves that the sequential application of first-arrival time analysis and FWI can effectively delineate the boundary of rock obstructions. Finally, the results of various detection methods were analyzed and compared in this study. Considering the advantages of various methods, we propose a cost-effective and high-precision workflow containing both geotechnical and geophysical investigations.

Keywords

• FWI
• Geotechnical and geophysical investigations
• Cross-hole seismic method
• Surface wave method
• Obstruction detection