ALBERT

Description: Continuous monitoring of fracturing processes in mine environments and the consequent characterization of the damage induced during mining exploitation is of primary interest both for mining engineering and civil protection. The development of improved monitoring and imaging methods is of great importance for salt mines as potential reservoirs for CO2 sequestration. Imaging tools able to handle continuous data streams and providing fast reliable information about stress perturbations and fracturing state will offer important new information to support local authorities in decision-making processes. The monitoring framework will manage continuous datasets, including acoustic, seismic, deformation and thermal data, give access to different inversion and modelling techniques. Continuous data acquisition and storage and automated routines for data analysis will be implemented to image the time evolution of 3D structures at a very local scale. Acoustic and seismic data, whose routinely use in mining survey is typically limited to estimate location and magnitude, will be more widely analysed thanks to full waveform analysis, learning from seismological applications at larger scales. Automated processing will include triggering, source location, moment tensor and extended source parameters inversion. This knowledge can be subsequently used to derive local stress perturbations. A set of different tools, based on statistical analysis of spatiotemporal crack distribution, will be applied to identify rupture clusters and fracturing processes. Local earthquake tomography, which couples source location and seismic velocity inversions, will be applied and interpreted to image the velocity structure. The inclusion of data from cavity deformation, thermal and chemical monitoring will complement acoustic and seismic information, providing a multidisciplinary dataset. The coupling of different data and joint interpretation/inversion methods within a common surveying framework will finally provide high-resolution 3D and 4D tomographic images of the mining area and a continuous monitoring of fracturing processes.