On the source-frequency dependence of fracture-orientation estimates from shear-wave transmission experiments

Shear-wave propagation through anisotropic fractured or cracked media can provide valuable information about these fracture swarms and their orientations. The main goal of this work is to recover information about fracture orientation based on the shear waveforms (S-waveforms). For this study, we carried out ultrasonic S-wave measurements in a synthetic physical model made of epoxy resin (isotropic matrix proxy), with small cylindrical rubber strips as inclusions (artificial cracks) inserted in it to simulate a homogeneous anisotropic medium. In these experiments, we used low, intermediate, and high frequency shear-wave sources, with frequencies 90, 431, and 840 kHz. We integrated and interpreted the resulting S-wave seismograms, cross-correlation panels and anisotropic parameter-analysis curves. We were able to estimate the crack orientation in single-orientation fracture zones. The high frequency peaks associated with scattered S-waves provided interpretable information about the fracture orientations when the propagation direction was parallel to the fracture plane. The analysis was possible utilizing results from frequency-versus-polarization-angle curves. Moreover, we applied a bandpass filtering process to the intermediate and high frequency seismograms in order to obtain low frequency seismograms. A spectral analysis using frequency-wavenumber (F-K) spectra supports this filtering process. The results obtained using an analysis of cross-correlograms and the Thomsen parameter γ extracted from filtered high-frequency data were quite similar to those obtained using a low-frequency source. This highlighted the possibility of using less expensive high-frequency sources to recover information about the fracture set.