Integral equation method for microseismic wavefield modelling in anisotropic elastic media

Abstract: In this paper, we present a frequency-domain volume integral method to model the microseismic wavefield in heterogeneous anisotropic-elastic media. The elastic wave equation is written as an integral equation of the Lippmann-Schwinger type, and the seismic source is represented as a general moment tensor. The displacement field due to a moment tensor source can be computed using the spatial derivative of the elastodynamic Green's function. The existing matrix-based implementation of the integral equation is computationally inefficient to model the wavefield in a three-dimensional earth. An integral equation for the particle displacement is, hence, formulated in a matrix-free manner through the application of the Fourier transform. The biconjugate gradient stabilized method is used to iteratively obtain the solution of this equation. We apply the numerical scheme to three different models in order of increasing geological complexity and obtain the elastic displacement fields corresponding to the different types of moment tensor sources. The volume integral method has an advantage over the time domain methods in regard to adding multiple sources since it can work with discrete frequencies, one by one, and limit the computational cost. The generated synthetic data can be useful in inversion for the microseismic source and model parameters.