Experimental capabilities of seismic emission tomography for solving the problems of searching and exploration of deep hydrocarbon accumulations

The standard seismic prospecting has been designed to investigate thin layering at shallow depths. At depths more than 4 km the rocks are significantly compacted, change their properties and it is often impossible to trace clear horizons by reflected waves. In the crystalline basement and lower horizons of the sedimentary cover the block structure of rocks is clearly manifested. Taking this into account geological models should be developed and other predictive indicators should be used when searching for hydrocarbon accumulations. For the study of great depths more informative seismic methods are emission and transmission tomography which have been developed in detail in seismology. This article discusses prognostic indicators different from seismic prospecting and presents experimental results confirming the success of emission tomography in their detection using the example of field studies at developed hydrocarbon deposit and other geophysical objects. The range of working depths of research covers the entire crust of the Earth including the crust-mantle transition zone. Keywords: seismic emission; emission tomography; rocks; hydrocarbon deposits.

Method for time-of-flight estimation of low frequency acoustic signals in reverberant and noisy environment with sparse impulse response

For acoustic procedures which rely on the speed of sound to derive process parameters, the determination of the acoustic time of flight is essential. In this work, a method for the determination of the time of flight (TOF) is presented. It is intended for reverberant and noisy environments and can be applied in the gas holdup determination in bubbly liquids via acoustic transmission tomography (GHATT) for example. The method includes the selection and design of the transmitted signal to optimize the disambiguate of the autocorrelation, the narrowing of the time window based on the Fractional Fourier Transform (FrFT) to accelerate the TOF estimation. Furthermore, it includes the consideration of the system-induced signal distortion through prior quasi-anechoic measurements and the sparse reconstruction of the spatial impulse response for TOF estimation using non-negative sparse deconvolution algorithms. The method is tested analytically on numerically generated signals and various sparse deconvolution algorithms are investigated with respect to their applicability and limitations.

SMAUG v1.0 – a user-friendly muon simulator for transmission tomography of geological objects in 3D

Knowledge about muon tomography has spread in recent years in the geoscientific community and several collaborations between geologists and physicists have been founded. As the data analysis is still mostly done by particle physicists, we address the need of the geoscientific community to participate in the data analysis, while not having to worry too much about the particle physics equations in the background. The result hereof is SMAUG, a toolbox consisting of several modules that cover the various aspects of data analysis in a muon tomographic experiment. In this study we show how a comprehensive geophysical model can be built from basic physics equations. The emerging uncertainties are dealt with by a probabilistic formulation of the inverse problem, which is finally solved by a Monte Carlo Markov Chain algorithm. Finally, we benchmark the SMAUG results against those of a recent study, which however, have been established with an approach that is not easily accessible to the geoscientific community. We show that they reach identical results with the same level of accuracy and precision.

A virtual laboratory for radiotracer and sealed-source applications in industry

Radioactive sealed sources and radiotracer techniques are used to diagnose industrial process units. This work introduces a workspace to simulate four sealed sources and radiotracer applications, namely, gamma scanning of distillation columns, gamma scanning of pipes, gamma transmission tomography, and radiotracer flow rate measurements. The workspace was created in Geant4 Application for Tomographic Emission (GATE) simulation toolkit and was called Industrial Radioisotope Applications Virtual Laboratory. The flexibility of GATE and the fact that it is an open-source software render it advantageous to radioisotope technology practitioners, educators, and students. The comparison of the simulation results with experimental results that are available in the literature showed the effectiveness of the virtual laboratory.