Determination of dispersive phase velocities for SASW method using harmonic wavelet transform

Abstract

The spectral analysis of surface waves (SASW) method is an in situ, seismic method for determining the shear wave velocity (or maximum shear modulus) profile of a site. The SASW test consists of three steps: field testing, evaluation of dispersion curve by phase unwrapping method, and determination of shear modulus profile by inversion process. In general, field testing and dispersion curve evaluation are regarded as simple work. However, because of characteristic of Fourier transform used in the conventional phase unwrappmig method, dispersion curve is sensitive to background noise and body waves in the low frequency range. Furthermore, under some field conditions such as pavement site, the usual phase unwrapping method can lead to erroneous dispersion curve. To overcome problem of the usual phase unwrapping method, in this paper, a new method of determining dispersion curve for SASW method was applied using time-frequency analysis based on harmonic wavelet transform as an alternative method of a current phase unwrapping method. To estimate the applicability of proposed method to SASW method, numerical simulations at various layered soil and pavement profiles were performed and the dispersion curves by proposed method are more reliable than those by the usual phase unwrapping method. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.