Video transcript:
My name is Yousef Abolfazlzadeh I'm a PhD candidate in mining engineering at Queen's University. Currently I am working in the geo-mechanical lab of Dr McKinnon at Queen's University and we do lots of wonderful work here we have access to many geo-mechanical software such as Itasca, Rocscience and ESG Solutions package.
So, briefly, my project is about mapping a stress field using seismic stress inversion As you know, the factor of safety is defined as the ratio between the strengths and the stress, so we know reasonably well about the strengths of a rock mass from the classification but generally we do not know well about the stress So, geological structures such as fault can affect stress in a volume. The traditional methods of stress determination have some problems for finding the exact value and orientation of the principal stresses because they are just point measurements. We use the seismic stress inversion to locally find stress.
The way that we work is like this. We have the ESG package and then the plot of the seismic events which are very small earthquakes.
So, as you can see, here we have the ore body in a mine and we have the different levels of that then I want to show you the events that we have for a year. These dots, purple ones, blue and yellow, are seismic events. Also, we have access to the waveforms of the seismic events from which we can clear the data about the waveforms first by filtering them and removing the ambient and cultural noises around the blast and after that we use the polarities of the P-waves and we plot them on a lower hemisphere, then we will find the orientation of the principal stresses.
As you see, it's a pretty exciting project and finally I want to say that I feels like Queen's is my home and give it a shot.