TECHNICAL PAPERS
Jul 1, 1993

Automated Surface Wave Method: Field Testing

Publication: Journal of Geotechnical Engineering
Volume 119, Issue 7

Abstract

The spectral analysis of surface waves (SASW) method is a nondestructive in situ seismic testing method for determining shear wave velocity profiles of soil sites and stiffness profiles of pavement systems. The key steps involved are construction of an experimental dispersion curve from data collected in situ, and inversion of the dispersion curve to determine the stiffness profile. In this paper, an automated method for the construction of dispersion curves is discussed. Weighted least‐squares best‐fit solution is used to estimate the phase at each frequency with coherence as weighing function. By knowing the distance between the receivers and the phase at each frequency, phase velocity and wavelength associated with that frequency are calculated. These raw data are then combined using the least‐absolute‐valuebest‐fit criterion to construct a dispersion curve. The inversion process for determination of stiffness profile from the dispersion curve is described in a companion paper.

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References

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Information & Authors

Information

Published In

Go to Journal of Geotechnical Engineering
Journal of Geotechnical Engineering
Volume 119Issue 7July 1993
Pages: 1094 - 1111

History

Received: Jan 7, 1992
Published online: Jul 1, 1993
Published in print: Jul 1993

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Authors

Affiliations

Soheil Nazarian, Member, ASCE
Assoc. Prof., Civ. Engrg. Dept., The Univ. of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX 79968
Milind R. Desai, Student Member, ASCE
Grad. Student, Dept. of Civ. Engrg., The Univ. of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX

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