Potential use of resonance frequencies in microseismic interpretation

Continuous passive recordings of microseismic experiments can be used to detect and trace the modifications in frequency content during hydraulic fracturing or heavy-oil steam injection. We analyze the performance of four different time-frequency representations, namely the short-time Fourier transform, the S-transform, the continuous wavelet transform, and the autoregressive method, on a real microseismic data set of intermediate quality. We show that time-frequency transforms provide an efficient tool to highlight time-varying resonance frequencies occurring during reservoir fracturing. Four distinct resonance frequencies at ∼17, ∼35, ∼51, and 60 Hz are observed during two experiments using the same experimental setup.

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