The safety and efficiency of tunnel construction depend on the knowledge of complex geologic conditions. Hence, an accurate forward-prospecting technique is required to detect unexpected inhomogeneous geologic structures ahead of tunnel construction. As an accurate method to image geologic heterogeneities, elastic reverse time migration (ERTM) is introduced to the field of tunnel forward prospecting. However, in the tunnel environment, ERTM images may suffer from the interference of crosstalk artifacts, which are caused by converted waves on tunnel surfaces. Therefore, considering the actual influence of the tunnel body, the decoupled nonconversion elastic equation was incorporated into traditional ERTM. This method prevents the generation of converted waves but ensures independent P- and S-wave propagation. In addition, wave-mode separation for raw seismic data is required in our approach. Synthetic examples based on the real geologic environment of tunnels show that our method produces satisfactory results for P-wave and S-wave imaging and the S-wave can produce a better imaging effect in tunnels. Finally, we apply our method to the seismic data obtained from a real highway tunnel construction site to demonstrate its performance in real-world applications. The results indicate that the migrated images can help to accurately constrain the geologic formations ahead of the tunnel face.

The accurate prediction of the geological conditions ahead of a tunnel plays an important role in tunnel construction. Among all forward geological prospecting methods, the seismic detection method is widely applied. However, due to the characteristics of the tunnel and the complexity of the geological conditions, the seismic wavefield is complicated. Carrying out a more realistic forward modeling method is vital for fully understanding the law of seismic wave propagation and the characteristics of seismic wavefield in the tunnel. In this paper, the 3D staggered-grid finite-difference scheme in the cylindrical coordinate system based on the decoupled nonconversion elastic wave equation is used to carry out the numerical simulation. This method can avoid the diffraction interferences produced at the edges of the tunnel face in the Cartesian coordinate system. Based on this forward modeling method, the characteristics of wavefield and propagation laws of seismic waves under three kinds of common typical unfavorable geological models were explored, which can provide theoretical guidance to seismic data interpretation of tunnel seismic forward prospecting in practice.