Shear Wave Velocity Profiling with Surface Wave Methods

Surface wave method was introduced as a tool to the geotechnical and infrastructure engineering fields in the early 1980's. Since then, the method has been continuously modified and improved. The adoption of the method has accelerated in the last ten years because of the interest of the engineering community, and due to the development of affordable and portable hardware and software. Despite numerous studies that demonstrate its effectiveness in a wide spectrum of applications, the method has not been fully embraced by the engineering community mainly due to lack of standardization. The common attributes of different approaches in implementing the surface method from the point of view of the engineering applications are discussed, followed by the practical and theoretical strengths and limitations of alternative approaches. Different approaches should provide satisfactory results as long as the inherent limitations of each approach are matched with the requirements of the engineering objectives of a given project.