TY - JOUR A1 - Niemz, Peter A1 - Cesca, Simone A1 - Heimann, Sebastian A1 - Grigoli, Francesco A1 - von Specht, Sebastian A1 - Hammer, Conny A1 - Zang, Arno A1 - Dahm, Torsten T1 - Full-waveform-based characterization of acoustic emission activity in a mine-scale experiment BT - a comparison of conventional and advanced hydraulic fracturing schemes JF - Geophysical journal international / the Royal Astronomical Society, the Deutsche Geophysikalische Gesellschaft and the European Geophysical Society N2 - Understanding fracturing processes and the hydromechanical relation to induced seismicity is a key question for enhanced geothermal systems (EGS). Commonly massive fluid injection, predominately causing hydroshearing, are used in large-scale EGS but also hydraulic fracturing approaches were discussed. To evaluate the applicability of hydraulic fracturing techniques in EGS, six in situ, multistage hydraulic fracturing experiments with three different injection schemes were performed under controlled conditions in crystalline rock at the Aspo Hard Rock Laboratory (Sweden). During the experiments the near-field ground motion was continuously recorded by 11 piezoelectric borehole sensors with a sampling rate of 1 MHz. The sensor network covered a volume of 30x30x30 m around a horizontal, 28-m-long injection borehole at a depth of 410 m. To extract and characterize massive, induced, high-frequency acoustic emission (AE) activity from continuous recordings, a semi-automated workflow was developed relying on full waveform based detection, classification and location procedures. The approach extended the AE catalogue from 196 triggered events in previous studies to more than 19600 located AEs. The enhanced catalogue, for the first time, allows a detailed analysis of induced seismicity during single hydraulic fracturing experiments, including the individual fracturing stages and the comparison between injection schemes. Beside the detailed study of the spatio-temporal patterns, event clusters and the growth of seismic clouds, we estimate relative magnitudes and b-values of AEs for conventional, cyclic progressive and dynamic pulse injection schemes, the latter two being fatigue hydraulic fracturing techniques. While the conventional fracturing leads to AE patterns clustered in planar regions, indicating the generation of a single main fracture plane, the cyclic progressive injection scheme results in a more diffuse, cloud-like AE distribution, indicating the activation of a more complex fracture network. For a given amount of hydraulic energy (pressure multiplied by injected volume) pumped into the system, the cyclic progressive scheme is characterized by a lower rate of seismicity, lower maximum magnitudes and significantly larger b-values, implying an increased number of small events relative to the large ones. To our knowledge, this is the first direct comparison of high resolution seismicity in a mine-scale experiment induced by different hydraulic fracturing schemes. KW - Fracture and flow KW - Spatial analysis KW - Statistical methods KW - Time-series analysis KW - Induced seismicity Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1093/gji/ggaa127 SN - 0955-419X SN - 1365-246X VL - 222 IS - 1 SP - 189 EP - 206 PB - Oxford Univ. Press CY - Oxford ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Isken, Marius Paul A1 - Vasyura-Bathke, Hannes A1 - Dahm, Torsten A1 - Heimann, Sebastian T1 - De-noising distributed acoustic sensing data using an adaptive frequency-wavenumber filter JF - Geophysical journal international N2 - Data recorded by distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) along an optical fibre sample the spatial and temporal properties of seismic wavefields at high spatial density. Often leading to massive amount of data when collected for seismic monitoring along many kilometre long cables. The spatially coherent signals from weak seismic arrivals within the data are often obscured by incoherent noise. We present a flexible and computationally efficient filtering technique, which makes use of the dense spatial and temporal sampling of the data and that can handle the large amount of data. The presented adaptive frequency-wavenumber filter suppresses the incoherent seismic noise while amplifying the coherent wavefield. We analyse the response of the filter in time and spectral domain, and we demonstrate its performance on a noisy data set that was recorded in a vertical borehole observatory showing active and passive seismic phase arrivals. Lastly, we present a performant open-source software implementation enabling real-time filtering of large DAS data sets. KW - Fourier analysis KW - Image processing KW - Time-series analysis KW - Seismic noise KW - Distributed acoustic sensing Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1093/gji/ggac229 SN - 0956-540X SN - 1365-246X VL - 231 IS - 2 SP - 944 EP - 949 PB - Oxford University Press CY - Oxford ER -