A Semi-Automatic Coupling Geophone for Tunnel Seismic Detection

The tunnel seismic method allows for the detection of the geology in front of a tunnel face for the safety of tunnel construction. Conventional geophones have problems such as a narrow spectral width, low sensitivity, and poor coupling with the tunnel wall. To tackle issues above, we propose a semi-automatic coupling geophone equipped with a piezoelectric sensor with a spectral range of 10–5000 Hz and a sensitivity of 2.8 V/g. After the geophone was manually pushed into the borehole, it automatically coupled with the tunnel wall under the pressure of the springs within the device. A comparative experiment showed that the data spectrum acquired by the semi-automatic coupling geophone was much higher than that of the conventional geophone equipped with the same piezoelectric sensor. The seismic data were processed in combination with forward modeling. The imaging results also show that the data acquired by the semi-automatic coupling geophone were more in line with the actual geological conditions. In addition, the semi-automatic coupling geophone’s installation requires a lower amount of time and cost. In summary, the semi-automatic coupling geophone is able to efficiently acquire seismic data with high fidelity, which can provide a reference for tunnel construction safety.