Novel Approach to Modeling the Seismic Waves in the Areas with Complex Fractured Geological Structures

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach to modeling the propagation of seismic waves in a medium containing subvertical fractured inhomogeneities, typical for mineralization zones. The developed method allows us to perform calculations on a structural computational grid, which avoids the construction of unstructured grids. For the calculations, the grid-characteristic method is used. We also present a comparison of the proposed method with the one described at earlier works and discuss the areas of its practical application. As an example, the numerical results for a cluster of subvertical fractures are given. A new approach for modeling fractures makes it quite easy to incorporate fractured objects into the seismic models and perform calculations without using algorithms on unstructured and curved grids.