A Cyclic Multi-Stage Implementation of the Full-Waveform Inversion for the Identification of Anomalies in Dams

For the safe and efficient operation of dams, frequent monitoring and maintenance are required. These are usually expensive, time consuming, and cumbersome. To alleviate these issues, we propose applying a wave-based scheme for the location and quantification of damages in dams. To obtain high-resolution “interpretable” images of the damaged regions, we drew inspiration from non-linear full-multigrid methods for inverse problems and applied a new cyclic multi-stage full-waveform inversion (FWI) scheme. Our approach is less susceptible to the stability issues faced by the standard FWI scheme when dealing with ill-posed problems. In this paper, we first selected an optimal acquisition setup and then applied synthetic data to demonstrate the capability of our approach in identifying a series of anomalies in dams by a mixture of reflection and transmission tomography. The results had sufficient robustness, showing the prospects of application in the field of non-destructive testing of dams.

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