Cavity effect on vertical and horizontal components of Rayleigh wave using 2D and 3D simulation models

The potential risk of subsurface anomalies such as sinkhole and cavity has always been an important issue in geotechnical and geophysical engineering. Subsurface cavities have dissimilar effects on different components of Rayleigh wave in each direction. This paper intends to detect cavity and intrusion in the half-space and layered soil media. Rayleigh (R) wave propagation is analyzed according to the classical Multi-channel Analysis of Surface Waves (MASW) method. 2D and 3D simulations of Surface wave testing were conducted using Finite Element Modeling (FEM) in Abaqus 6.14. The results show the significant effect of the subsurface cavity on the particle motion and radial component of the Rayleigh wave. Cavity location is determined based on the variation of the maximum normalized amplitude for each trace. Furthermore, the perturbation of the elliptic shape above the cavity can help in cavity detection compared with the recorded data before and after the cavity.