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At least 1,045 records · Page 58
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2016

Asperity generation and its relationship to seismicity on a planar fault: A laboratory simulation

Earthquake faults, and all frictional surfaces, establish contact through asperities. A detailed knowledge of how asperities form will enable a better understanding of the manner in which they communicate during foreshock failure sequences that are observed, leading to the larger main shock. We present results of experiments where a pressure sensitive film was used to map, size and measure the magnitudes of the normal stresses at asperities along a seismogenic section of a laboratory simulated fault. We measured seismicity acoustically and foreshocks were found to be the result of localized asperity failure during the nucleation phase of gross fault rupture. Since surface roughness plays an important role in how asperities are formed, two Hurst exponents were measured to characterize a highly worn interface using roughness profiles: (i) long wavelength estimates (H ~ 0.45) and (ii) short wavelength estimates (H ~ 0.8-1.2). The short wavelength roughness estimates were computed at the scale of single asperity junction points. Macroscopically, the number of asperities and real contact area increased with additional application of normal force while the mean normal stress remained constant. The ratio of real to nominal contact area was low - ranging from 0.02 < A r /A 0 < 0.05-predicting that the asperities should be elastically independent of each other. Results from the pressure sensitive film showed that asperities were closely spaced and could not be treated as mechanically independent. Larger asperities carried both higher levels of average normal stress and higher levels of normal stress heterogeneity than smaller ones. Using linear stability theorem, the critical slip distance on foreshocking asperities was estimated to be d 0 ~ 0.65-3 μm. The critical slip distance d 0 was ~1.8-11.5 per cent of the premonitory slip needed to initiate gross fault rupture of the interface (20-40 μm) and the overall slip necessary to initiate gross fault rupture was on the order of the average asperity diameter (52 μm). In conclusion, foreshocks may be due to a change in the critical slip distance, at localized sections of the fault, caused by the two distinct roughness profiles measured at short and long length scales.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2017

Internal structure of the San Jacinto fault zone at Blackburn Saddle from seismic data of a linear array

Local and teleseismic earthquake waveforms recorded by a 180-m-long linear array (BB) with seven seismometers crossing the Clark fault of the San Jacinto fault zone northwest of Anza are used to image a deep bimaterial interface and core damage structure of the fault. Delay times of P waves across the array indicate an increase in slowness from the southwest most (BB01) to the northeast most (BB07) station. Automatic algorithms combined with visual inspection and additional analyses are used to identify local events generating fault zone head and trapped waves. The observed fault zone head waves imply that the Clark fault in the area is a sharp bimaterial interface, with lower seismic velocity on the southwest side. The moveout between the head and direct P arrivals for events within ~40 km epicentral distance indicates an average velocity contrast across the fault over that section and the top 20 km of 3.2 per cent. A constant moveout for events beyond ~40 km to the southeast is due to off-fault locations of these events or because the imaged deep bimaterial interface is discontinuous or ends at that distance. The lack of head waves from events beyond ~20 km to the northwest is associated with structural complexity near the Hemet stepover. Events located in a broad region generate fault zone trapped waves at stations BB04–BB07. Waveform inversions indicate that the most likely parameters of the trapping structure are width of ~200 m, S velocity reduction of 30–40 per cent with respect to the bounding blocks, Q value of 10–20 and depth of ~3.5 km. The trapping structure and zone with largest slowness are on the northeast side of the fault. The observed sense of velocity contrast and asymmetric damage across the fault suggest preferred rupture direction of earthquakes to the northwest. This inference is consistent with results of other geological and seismological studies.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2017

Analysis of non-diffuse characteristics of the seismic noise field in southern California based on correlations of neighbouring frequencies

Non-diffuse characteristics of the ambient seismic noise wavefield recorded at 154 broad-band stations in southern California are analysed by computing the correlation matrix of power spectral values at neighbouring frequencies. The similarities of the derived correlation matrices are compared by choosing a different reference station at a time. The data recorded by the different stations are classified into five groups using a hierarchical clustering algorithm based on the similarity of the correlation matrices. Stations belonging to different groups are clustered spatially in the Los Angeles basin, mountains and regions farther from the coast. The deviations from diffuse wavefield in the correlation matrices of representative stations from the five groups are inverted for dominant cross-frequency components. These are used to derive power spectral ratios of non-diffuse noise and fully diffuse noise. The similarity maps for different reference stations and the inverted cross-frequency components provide information on properties of the noise sources and propagation/scattering characteristics in the different regions.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2019

Balancing unevenly distributed data in seismic tomography: a global adjoint tomography example

SUMMARY The uneven distribution of earthquakes and stations in seismic tomography leads to slower convergence of nonlinear inversions and spatial bias in inversion results. Including dense regional arrays, such as USArray or Hi-Net, in global tomography causes severe convergence and spatial bias problems, against which conventional pre-conditioning schemes are ineffective. To save computational cost and reduce model bias, we propose a new strategy based on a geographical weighting of sources and receivers. Unlike approaches based on ray density or the Voronoi tessellation, this method scales to large full-waveform inversion problems and avoids instabilities at the edges of dense receiver or source clusters. We validate our strategy using a 2-D global waveform inversion test and show that the new weighting scheme leads to a nearly twofold reduction in model error and much faster convergence relative to a conventionally pre-conditioned inversion. We implement this geographical weighting strategy for global adjoint tomography.

Ruan, Youyi↗
DOE OSTI2015

Effectiveness of nondestructive methods for the Evaluation of structures affected by internal swelling reactions: a review of electric, seismic and acoustic methods based on laboratory and site experiences

Internal swelling reactions (ISR) (which mainly comprise alkali-silica reaction, alkali-carbonate reaction, delayed ettringite formation, etc) are damage processes that affect the long-term durability of concrete structures. The reactions are apparently characterized by series of closely spaced, tight map cracks with wide cracks appearing at regular intervals, and excessive tensile stresses in rebars. These phenomena are alarming for affected structure managers as they deal with people safety and structures operation. Moreover, there is no easily implemented way to stop the reactions. Prediction of concrete expansion, structural degradation, and assessment of efficiency and periodicity of repair works are crucial issues. The aim of this work is to explore the applicability of some nondestructive techniques (NDT) of investigations (electric, seismic, and acoustic methods) to differentiate the structure zones affected or not by the ISR for different exposure conditions. The collected experience highlights that the coupling between some of those nondestructive (ND) methods can reduce the measurement uncertainty and eliminates the factors that may influence the characterization of the structure parts affected by ISR. Nevertheless, for a complete structure reassessment, it is also desirable to refer to global geometrical/topographical survey and to destructive analysis methods on some cored samples for chemical analysis, petrography, and residual expansion measurements.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2023

MODELING A SPENT NUCLEAR FUEL CASK SEISMIC TEST

The US Department of Energy Spent Fuel and Waste Science and Technology (SFWST) program is planning to conduct a series of full-scale shake table tests to simulate hypothetical earthquake conditions and record the response of surrogate spent nuclear fuel (SNF) assemblies in a canister dry storage system mockup. The shake table motions will represent a range of hypothetical earthquake conditions at hypothetical locations in the continental US to generally define the range of mechanical loads that SNF can be expected to experience during extended dry storage periods. The earthquake conditions will represent seismic hazards in the 2,000-to-20,000-year return period range. The test will use instrumented pressurized water reactor fuel assemblies with surrogate mass inside the fuel rods instead of radioactive fuel pellets. Dummy assemblies with similar mass and dimensions to actual fuel assemblies will occupy the rest of the fuel assembly locations in a SNF canister that holds 32 fuel assemblies. The canister will be located inside a mockup vertical concrete cask. Instrumentation will record the motion of the major components of the complex dynamic system, and strain gauges will be used to record the cladding strain at select locations. Preparations for the test require modeling predictions to identify the range of response of the system and to help select specific earthquake cases to be simulated on the shake table from a large set of potential cases. This paper describes the pretest nonlinear finite element modeling efforts that have been completed to date, including cask system level modeling and fuel assembly modeling in LS-DYNA. The cask system level models are critical for anticipating sliding or tipping of an unanchored cask during the test. The fuel assembly model is needed to estimate the range of cladding strain response and fuel assembly structural response to be expected during the test and cladding strain measurements will be key metrics for model validation and the development of modeling best practices after the test is concluded.

Klymyshyn, Nicholas A.↗
DOE OSTI2024

Pretest Modeling A Spent Nuclear Fuel Seismic Shake Test

The U.S. Department of Energy Spent Fuel and Waste Science and Technology (SFWST) program is planning to conduct a series of full-scale shake table tests to simulate hypothetical earthquake conditions and record the response of surrogate spent nuclear fuel (SNF) assemblies in a dry canister storage system mockup. The shake table motions will represent a range of hypothetical earthquake conditions at hypothetical locations in the continental U.S. to generally define the range of mechanical loads that SNF can be expected to experience during extended dry storage periods. This paper describes the pretest predictions made with LS-DYNA models of the mockup storage systems. The test will use two dry storage system configurations, a mockup vertical concrete cask (VCC) and a mockup horizontal storage module (HSM). The test will use a production-quality canister and basket. Within the canister will be four instrumented fuel assemblies with fuel rods containing surrogate mass and 28 instrumented dummy assemblies that are intended to match the mass and outer dimension of a fuel assembly. The finite element models include models of the VCC and HSM on the shake table to calculate the system level dynamic responses and separate single fuel assembly models to calculate stress and strain in fuel assembly components. Both types of models include nonlinear behavior like rod-to-rod contact and the ability for VCC’s to rock and slide. This paper presents the expected response of the VCC, HSM, and fuel assemblies to the shake table testing that is planned to start in April of 2024. The earthquake conditions represent seismic hazards in the 2,000-to-20,000-year return period range. The test data is expected to confirm the expectation that fuel rod cladding will remain intact, fuel assembly structural components like guide tubes will remain intact, and no significant VCC sliding or tipping will occur in the range of conditions to be tested with the shake table.

Klymyshyn, Nicholas A.↗
DOE OSTI2017

Induced seismicity provides insight into why earthquake ruptures stop

Injection-induced earthquakes pose a serious seismic hazard but also offer an opportunity to gain insight into earthquake physics. Currently used models relating the maximum magnitude of injection-induced earthquakes to injection parameters do not incorporate rupture physics. We develop theoretical estimates, validated by simulations, of the size of ruptures induced by localized pore-pressure perturbations and propagating on prestressed faults. Our model accounts for ruptures growing beyond the perturbed area and distinguishes self-arrested from runaway ruptures. We develop a theoretical scaling relation between the largest magnitude of self-arrested earthquakes and the injected volume and find it consistent with observed maximum magnitudes of injection-induced earthquakes over a broad range of injected volumes, suggesting that, although runaway ruptures are possible, most injection-induced events so far have been self-arrested ruptures.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2017

Seasonal water storage, stress modulation, and California seismicity

Establishing what controls the timing of earthquakes is fundamental to understanding the nature of the earthquake cycle and critical to determining time-dependent earthquake hazard. Seasonal loading provides a natural laboratory to explore the crustal response to a quantifiable transient force. In California, water storage deforms the crust as snow and water accumulates during the wet winter months. Here, we used 9 years of global positioning system (GPS) vertical deformation time series to constrain models of monthly hydrospheric loading and the resulting stress changes on fault planes of small earthquakes.The seasonal loading analysis reveals earthquakes occurring more frequently during stress conditions that favor earthquake rupture.We infer that California seismicity rates are modestly modulated by natural hydrological loading cycles.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2017

Assessment of Horizontal External Stresses in the Vorkuta Mine Field Using Seismic Tomography Data

3D geomechanical model of the Vorkuta Mine, Pechora Coal Basin, has been developed and implemented numerically. By the data on dynamic events recorded by stationary seismic stations, tomography of the study object is performed, and velocity of elastic waves is recovered in the illuminated area of the object. The boundary value inverse problem on horizontal external stresses by stress distribution found using empirical relations between elastic wave velocities and stresses determined in the laboratoryscale experiments is formulated and solved.

01 COAL, LIGNITE, AND PEAT↗
DOE OSTI2015

Seismic waveform viewer, processor and calculator

SWIFT is a computer code that is designed to do research level signal analysis on seismic waveforms, including visualization, filtering and measurement. LLNL is using this code, amplitude and global tomography efforts.

Matzel, E.↗
DOE OSTI2016

Infrasound and seismic detections associated with the 7 September 2015 Bangkok fireball

A bright fireball was reported at 01:43:35 UTC on September 7, 2015 at a height of ~30 km above 14.5°N, 98.9°E near Bangkok, Thailand. It had a TNT yield equivalent of 3.9 kilotons (kt), making it the largest fireball detected in South–East Asia since the ~50 kt 2009 Sumatra bolide. Infrasonic signals were observed at four infrasound arrays that are part of the International Monitoring System (IMS) and one infrasound array located in Singapore. Acoustic bearings and event origin times inferred from array processing are consistent with the eyewitness accounts. A seismic signal associated with this event was also likely recorded at station SRDT, in Thailand. As a result, an acoustic energy equivalent of 1.15 ± 0.24 kt is derived from the Singaporean acoustic data using the period of the peak energy.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2022

Early arrival waveform inversion using data uncertainties and matching filters with application to near-surface seismic refraction data

We develop an early arrival waveform inversion (EAWI) technique for high-resolution near-surface velocity estimation by iteratively updating the P-wave velocity model to minimize the difference between the observed and calculated seismic refraction data. Traditional EAWI uses a least-squares penalty function and an acoustic forward-modeling engine. Conventional least-squares error is sensitive to data with low signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) and iterations of EAWI stop at a local-minimum data misfit or at the preassigned maximum number of iterations. These stopping criteria can result in overfitting the data. In addition, fitting the elastic field data with an acoustic modeling engine can introduce artifacts in velocity estimation, especially in land data with significant elastic effects. To overcome these challenges, we develop a robust EAWI (REAWI) method by (1) incorporating the data uncertainties into the penalty function and (2) mitigating the elastic effects using a matching filter workflow. The data uncertainties are estimated from waveform reciprocal errors. When full-waveform reciprocity is not available, trace interpolation is applied. The proposed method prevents closely fitting data with low S/N, avoids overall overfitting by stopping the iterations when a normalized chi-square ([Formula: see text]) waveform misfit of one is achieved, and is less affected by elastic effects. Numerical examples and application to near-surface refraction data at a groundwater contamination site suggest that the final REAWI models are more accurate than the corresponding EAWI models, at the same level of misfit. This is the first known application of a matching filter workflow to real land data. The final REAWI models satisfy an appropriate misfit between the real data and predicted elastic P-wave data, making this approach in this respect equivalent to elastic waveform inversion. We also develop a method to analyze model constraint by examining the energy of the wavefield Fréchet derivative thereby avoiding the influence of the data residuals in traditional Fréchet kernels.

Geochemistry & Geophysics↗
DOE OSTI2022

Joint physics-based and data-driven time-lapse seismic inversion: Mitigating data scarcity

In carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), developing rapid and effective imaging techniques is crucial for real-time monitoring of the spatial and temporal dynamics of CO 2 propagation during/after injection. With continuing improvements in computational power and data storage, data-driven techniques based on machine learning (ML) have been effectively applied to seismic inverse problems. In particular, ML helps alleviate the ill-posedness and high computational cost of full-waveform inversion (FWI). However, such data-driven inversion techniques require massive high-quality training data sets to ensure prediction accuracy, which hinders their application to time-lapse monitoring of CO 2 sequestration. We propose an efficient “hybrid” time-lapse workflow that combines physics-based FWI and data-driven ML inversion. The scarcity of the available training data is addressed by developing a new data-generation technique with physics constraints. The method is vali dated on a synthetic CO 2 -sequestration model based on the Kimberlina storage reservoir in California. The proposed approach is shown to synthesize a large volume of high-quality, physically realistic training data, which is critically important in accurately characterizing the CO 2 movement in the reservoir. In conclusion, the developed hybrid methodology can also simultaneously predict the variations in velocity and saturation and achieve high spatial resolution in the presence of realistic noise in the data.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2024

Introduction to special section: Induced seismicity

Induced seismicity refers to earthquakes related to anthropogenic activities such as wastewater disposal, hydraulic fracturing, and geothermal energy production. In Oklahoma, wastewater disposal is considered to have caused more than 100 earthquakes of magnitude 4 and above (M4+) since 2010. Similarly, over 50 such events have been recorded in the Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico. Additionally, some of these earthquakes have magnitudes exceeding 5.0, including a magnitude 5.8 event in Pawnee, Oklahoma, in a magnitude 5.6 event in the Peace River Oil Sands Area in Alberta, and a magnitude 5.4 event in the Delaware Basin of Texas.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2024

Utah FORGE 5-2428: Coupled Investigation of Fracture Permeability Impact on Reservoir Stress and Seismic Slip - 2024 Annual Workshop Presentation

This is a presentation on the Coupled Investigation of Fracture Permeability Impact on Reservoir Stress and Seismic Slip Behavior by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, presented by Kayla Kroll. This presentation addresses testing and modelling related to the dependency of EGS production on sustained permeability and sufficient fluid flow through pre-existing or induced fractures in hot rock. This presentation was featured in the Utah FORGE R&D Annual Workshop on August 13, 2024.

15 GEOTHERMAL ENERGY↗