Summary High-resolution seismic tomography performed on rock samples at the laboratory scale is a key ingredient for subsurface rock characterization from seismic imaging. We investigate the performance of first-arrival travel-time tomography on data obtained from a 2D acquisition on a slice of a selected carbonate core using a well-controlled experimental prototype, which involves a point-like pulsed-laser (PL) or a piezoelectric transducer (PZT) as seismic source and a single-point Laser Doppler Vibrometer (LDV) as a receiver which can be shifted during a single experiment. Wave propagation simulations are run on a realistic synthetic 2D slice. Tomography trials on synthetic records establish an optimal inversion strategy, from handling first-arrival travel-time picking to building velocity models by first-break times tomography. The velocity image obtained from the PL-LDV dataset displays similar patterns compared to the X-ray CT-scan image, although the latter is a tomographic image of attenuation. In contrast, the velocity reconstructed from the PZT-LDV dataset shows substantial differences. We therefore recommend the PL-LDV protocol as a reference tool for experimental characterization of core samples based on seismic wave propagation. Adding quantitative core velocity reconstruction to crustal seismic imaging and well-log information will potentially improve the quantitative characterization of the complex subsurface composition. The possible extension to a 3D configuration should be even more fruitful when considering later phases for multi-physics interpretation.
Shen et al. (Wed,) studied this question.