A novel method for low-frequency quality control of seismic vibrator ground force

Abstract

Seismic vibrators are the primary sources for land seismic acquisition, featuring controllable bandwidth and energy, low environmental impact, safety, and high efficiency. With the widespread application of “2W&H” technology, wide-frequency seismic data, particularly low-frequency components, have attracted increasing attention. However, the ground force output of a vibrator is severely constrained at low frequencies, primarily due to limitations in its mechanical and hydraulic systems. Among these, hydraulic system limitations are often associated with oil flow, which is largely constrained by the pump’s maximum capacity; however, oil flow is not measured during vibrator sweeps. The system complexity prevents the installation of flow sensors on vibrators, making the performance of the vibrator oil flow unmonitored. Since the oil flow directly determines the quality of the vibrator ground force output, it is essential to understand the behavior of vibrator oil flow. In this study, a detailed analysis of the working mechanism of a seismic vibrator was conducted, as well as its low-frequency force-output limitations. Then, we proposed a method for estimating vibrator oil flow. Both theoretical analyses and field-testing data were used to validate the proposed estimation method. The estimated data demonstrated strong consistency with the direct flow measurement using flow sensors. Moreover, the results confirm the feasibility of the proposed estimation method. This method provides a real-time quality control indicator for the vibrator oil flow performance during vibrator sweeps, thereby enabling complete monitoring of the vibrator performance quality at low frequencies. In addition, this method holds promising potential for broad application in land vibroseis exploration.

Keywords

Vibrator / Low-frequency / Oil flow / Quality control

Acknowledgments

We thank BGP for providing the seismic data used in this study and granting permission for the data to be published.

Funding

This study was financially supported by the science and technology project “Research on Multi-physical Field High-Precision Oil and Gas Geophysical Exploration Technology and Equipment” (No.2023ZZ05) of the China National Petroleum Corporation, titled Theory, Key Technologies, and Core Equipment of Full Wave Field Seismic Acquisition.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Author contributions

Conceptualization: Mingtao Nie, Zhouhong Wei

Formal analysis: Mingtao Nie, Zhouhong Wei, Yang Liu

Funding acquisition: Mingtao Nie,Yongfei Qi

Investigation: Tao Fang, Xiaolong Jiang, Yongan Xu

Methodology: Mingtao Nie, Zhouhong Wei

Validation: Zhouhong Wei, Yang Liu

Writing-original draft: Mingtao Nie, Zhouhong Wei, Yongfei Qi

Writing-review and editing: All authors

Availability of data

All data analyzed are presented in the paper.

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