Application of Time-Domain Full Waveform Inversion to Cross-Hole Radar Data Measured at Xiuyan Jade Mine, China

Xiuyan Jade, produced in Xiuyan County, Liaoning Province, China is one of the four famous jade in China. King Jade, which is deemed the largest jade body of the world, was broken out from a hill. The local government planned to build a tourism site based on the jade culture there. The purpose of the investigation was to evaluate the stability of subsurface foundation, and the possible positions of mined-out zones to prevent the further rolling of the jade body. Cross-hole radar tomography is the key technique in the investigation. Conventional travel time and attenuation tomography based on ray tracing theory cannot provide high-resolution images because only a fraction of the measured information is used in the inversion. Full-waveform inversion (FWI) can provide high-resolution permittivity and conductivity images because it utilizes all the information provided by the radar signals. We deduce the gradient expression of the time-domain FWI with respect to the permittivity and conductivity using a method that is different from that of the previous work and realize the FWI algorithm that can simultaneously update the permittivity and conductivity by using the conjugate gradient method. Inverted results from synthetic data show that time-domain FWI can significantly improve the resolution compared with the ray-based tomogram methods. FWI can distinguish targets that are as small as one-half to one-third wavelength and the inverted physical values are closer to the real ones than those provided by the ray tracing method. We use the FWI algorithm to the field data measured at Xiuyan jade mine. Both the inverted permittivity and conductivity can comparably delineate four mined-out zones, which exhibit low-permittivity and low-conductivity characteristics. Furthermore, the locations of the interpreted mined-out zones are in good agreement with the existing mining channels recorded by geological data.