Quantitative Evaluation of the “Non-Enclosed” Microseismic Array: A Case Study in a Deeply Buried Twin-Tube Tunnel

Abstract

The high-stress hazards of underground engineering have stimulated the exploration of microseismic monitoring and early warning methods. To achieve a good monitoring effect, the monitoring object is usually enclosed by a microseismic array (sensor array) (e.g., slope engineering, etc.). However, some characteristics of a buried tunnel, including “linear”, “deep-buried”, and “long”, make it difficult to deploy a reasonable microseismic array, which leads to the microseismic array being non-enclosed for the monitoring object. Application of the non-enclosed microseismic array yields decreases the accuracy of the source location. To solve the problem wisely, this paper deals with the feasibility of non-enclosed microseismic arrays (axial-extended, lateral-extended, and twin-tube arrays) by introducing a quantitative method. To this end, an optimized microseismic array with the best source location accuracy for a twin-tube expressway tunnel is proposed. The obtained results reveal that the non-enclosed microseismic arrays, which are unavoidable in expressway tunnel engineering, do not introduce errors but reduce the ability to resist them. Further, the twin-tube array achieves a better source location accuracy than the axial and lateral-extended arrays. In the application of the source location based on the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to the twin-tube array, microseismic events, which cluster in the rockburst section, are wholly gathered, and the maximum error is reduced by about 30–50 m, indicating its greater feasibility with respect to the single-tube array.