CSEG Recorder-March 2009-Seismic Physical Modelling at the University of Calgary

The University of Calgary Seismic Physical Modelling Facility, in existence since 1985, has been an important tool for seismic exploration research for many years. However, by the standards of the 21st century, it was badly outdated and needed significant improvements. In recent years, we have overhauled and modernized the facility, incorporating such upgrades as a precise six-axes positioning system using linear electric motors and arrays of small ultrasonic source and detector transducers. In addition we have replaced the original electronics with improved circuits for driving source transducers, amplifying detected signals, and signal digitization. Motor control and digital data acquisition are now performed by commercially available circuit boards installed in a modern desktop computer. Once an experiment simulating a seismic survey is set up, it is conducted by the supervisory computer executing customized software within the Windows XP Professional operating system. Automated synchronization of transducer movements and recording of modelled seismic signals from multichannel transmitter and receiver arrays constitute a simple robotics application. Tight integration of the new hardware and software components allows us to efficiently conduct high-fold 2D/3D marine and land seismic surveys with a variety of survey geometries.