A critical porosity model is often used to calculate the dry frame elastic modulus by the rock critical porosity value which is affected by many factors. In practice it is hard for us to obtain an accurate critical porosity value and we can generally take only an empirical critical porosity value which often causes errors. In this paper, we propose a method to obtain the rock critical porosity value by inverting P-wave velocity and applying it to predict S-wave velocity. The applications of experiment and log data both show that the critical porosity inversion method can reduce the uncertainty resulting from using an empirical value in the past and provide the accurate critical porosity value for predicting S-wave velocity which significantly improves the prediction accuracy.
Rayleigh waves have high amplitude, low frequency, and low velocity, which are treated as strong noise to be attenuated in reflected seismic surveys. This study addresses how to identify useful shear wave velocity profile and stratigraphic information from Rayleigh waves. We choose the Firefly algorithm for inversion of surface waves. The Firefly algorithm, a new type of particle swarm optimization, has the advantages of being robust, highly effective, and allows global searching. This algorithm is feasible and has advantages for use in Rayleigh wave inversion with both synthetic models and field data. The results show that the Firefly algorithm, which is a robust and practical method, can achieve nonlinear inversion of surface waves with high resolution.