P- and S-wave Arrival Time Combined Bayesian Location Method for a Microseismic Event

Microseismic (MS) source location is a critical technology in MS monitoring. Traditionally, P-wave or S-wave travel time-based ray-tracing algorithms are adopted for a mine MS event location. However, only a few data are available for an MS event location usually, which may result in a large location error. A P- and S-wave arrival time combined objective function can obtain a relatively better location result. However, previous studies have encountered several challenges: 1) the combined weighting should be a free parameter determined by the quality of P- and S-wave arrival time data; 2) all the arrival times including bad data are adopted for an MS event location. To handle this, a P- and S-wave arrival time combined Bayesian location (P_SBL) method has been proposed for an MS event location. To reduce the influence of large picking errors, 80% of arrival time data were randomly selected in each iteration. Two synthetic events and eight blasting events were used to test the proposed method. Synthetic results show that the average location error of the P_SBL method is only 9.96 m, when 2 and 4 ms Gaussian noises were separately included for the P-wave and S-wave travel time data. The application results demonstrate that the average location error of the P_SBL method is 31.97 m, which improves the location accuracy by 25.40% and 60.78% compared with the P_BL and S_BL methods, respectively.