Acquiring physically-modeled seismic data using 70kHz piezoelectric buzzers

Joe Wong, Kevin L. Bertram, Kristopher A. Innanen

Efficient full-waveform inversion (FWI) imaging of complex velocity structures requires seismic data with low dominant frequencies in the range of 4Hz to 10Hz. When immersed in water in the laboratory, piezoelectric buzzers on will generate and detect vibrations with low-end ultrasonic frequencies ranging from 40kHz to 100kHz, so physically-modelled seismograms recorded with buzzer transducers will have the low frequencies (after applying a scaling factor of 104) required for seismic FWI. However, due to resonance effects in the buzzers, the seismogram codas are too long and too variable for them to serve as ideal FWT source wavelets. Finding ways to mitigate these two unfavorable characteristics is an ongoing task in our research in physical modelling.