Optimal Use of Stress Waves in Non-Intrusive Seismic Techniques for Geotechnical Applications

Stress waves have been used for geophysical and geotechnical applications for more than 50 years. The early-stage applications were simply based on travel-time measurements of stress waves and limited to site characterization. Currently stress-wave techniques are expanded to monitoring processes for grouting of damaged geotechnical structures, compaction of embankment, and deformational analyses for static geotechnical problems. Seismic techniques used to be good enough for rough estimators of engineering properties. Nowadays, the sophisticated modeling theory of stress-wave propagation substantially improved reliability and accuracy of the seismic techniques. In this paper, difficulties involved in currently available seismic techniques are discussed and analyzed. Herein some recently-developed non-intrusive seismic techniques, which make optimal use of stress waves for further improvement of reliability and accuracy, are also presented.