title: Inversion of guided-wave dispersion data with application to borehole acoustics.
abstract: The problem of inferring unknown geometry and material parameters of a waveguide model from noisy samples of the associated modal dispersion curves is considered. In a significant reduction of the complexity of a common inversion methodology, the inner of two nested iterations is eliminated: The approach described does not employ explicit fitting of the data to computed dispersion curves. Instead, the unknown parameters are adjusted to minimize a cost function derived directly from the determinant of the boundary condition system matrix. This results in an efficient inversion scheme that, in the case of noise-free data, yields exact results. Multimode data can be simultaneously processed without extra complications. Furthermore, the inversion scheme can accommodate an arbitrary number of unknown parameters, provided that the data have sufficient sensitivity to these parameters. As an important application, we consider the sonic guidance condition for a fluid-filled borehole in an elastic, homogeneous, and isotropic rock formation for numerical forward and inverse dispersion analysis. We investigate numerically the parametric inversion with errors in the model parameters and the influence of bandwidth and noise, and examine the cases of multifrequency and multimode data, using simulated flexural and Stoneley dispersion data.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139-4307, USA. henning.braunisch@intel.com
authors.forename: Henning
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Braunisch
authors.forename: Tarek M
authors.initials: TM
authors.lastname: Habashy
authors.forename: Bikash K
authors.initials: BK
authors.lastname: Sinha
authors.forename: Jahir
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Pabon
authors.forename: Jin A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Kong