Improvements in mining induced microseismic source locations at the Lucky Friday mine using an automated whole-waveform analysis system

For years, severe rockburst problems at the Lucky Friday mine in northern Idaho have been a persistent safety hazard and an impediment to production. An MP250 based microseismic monitoring system, which uses simple voltage threshold picking of first arrivals, has been used in this mine since 1973 to provide source locations and energy estimates of seismic events. Recently, interest has been expressed in developing a whole waveform microseismic monitoring system for the mine to provide more accurate source locations and information about source characteristics. For this study, we have developed a prototype whole-waveform microseismic monitoring system based on a 80386 computer equipped with a 50 kHz analog-digital convertor board. The software developed includes a data collection program, a data analysis program, and an event detection program. Whole-waveform data collected and analyzed using this system during a three-day test have been employed to investigate sources of error in the hypocenter location process and to develop an automatic phase picker appropriate for microseismic events.Comparison of hypocenter estimates produced by the MP250 system to those produced by the whole-waveform system shows that significant timing errors are common in the MP250 system and that these errors caused a large part of the scatter evident in the daily activity plots produced at the mine. Simulations and analysis of blast data show that analytical control over the solutions is strongly influenced by the array geometry. Within the geophone array, large errors in the velocity model or moderate timing errors may result in small changes in the solution, but outside the array, the solution is very sensitive to small changes in the data.Our whole-waveform detection program picks event onset times and determines event durations by analysis of a segmented envelope function (SEF) derived from the microseismic signal. The detection program has been tested by comparing its arrival time picks to those generated by human analysis of the data set. The program picked 87% of the channels that were picked by hand with a standard error of 0.75 milliseconds. Source locations calculated using times provided by our entire waveform detection program were similar to those calculated using hand-picked arrival times. In particular, they show far less scatter than source locations calculated using arrival times based on simple voltage threshold picking of first arrivals.