Travel times and ray paths for acoustic and elastic waves in generally anisotropic media

TL;DR

This paper introduces efficient methods for calculating travel times and ray paths in anisotropic media, improving computational speed while maintaining accuracy, which benefits wavefield tomography in geophysics and related fields.

Contribution

It presents a novel forward modelling approach for travel time fields and a new ray tracing method in anisotropic media, reducing computational costs compared to finite element models.

Findings

Travel time calculations are comparable to finite element methods.

Methods are computationally more efficient.

Applicable to complex anisotropic structures.

Abstract

Wavefield travel time tomography is used for a variety of purposes in acoustics, geophysics and non-destructive testing. Since the problem is non-linear, assessing uncertainty in the results requires many forward evaluations. It is therefore important that the forward evaluation of travel times and ray paths is efficient, which is challenging in anisotropic media. Given a computed travel time field, ray tracing can be performed to obtain the fastest ray path from any point in the medium to the source of the travel time field. These rays can then be used to speed up gradient based inversion methods. We present a forward modeller for calculating travel time fields by localised estimation of wavefronts, and a novel approach to ray tracing through travel time fields. These methods have been tested in a complex anisotropic weld and give travel times comparable to those obtained using finite element modelling while being computationally cheaper.