Effective coal seam surface modeling with an improved anisotropy-based, multiscale interpolation method

Qingren Jia, Defu Che, WenWen Li

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

12 Scopus citations

Abstract

A reliable coal seam model is highly significant for mining design and resource assessment. However, due to the anisotropic nature of geological attributes, accurately modeling the surface using existing interpolation methods is difficult. Here, we propose a new method for coal seam surface modeling. First, we introduce a multiscale interpolation method using compactly supported radial basis functions (CSRBFs) and improve the modeling accuracy by anisotropy calculations using the raw mine data set. Then a fault modeling method is provided to simulate faults intersecting with coal seams. This method consists of three main parts: (1) anisotropy calculation to alleviate the effects of global anisotropy; (2) rapid coal seam surface modeling of large amounts of nonuniform data through an anisotropic multiscale CSRBF method and then visualization and organization of the surface into a triangulated irregular network (TIN); and (3) local reconstruction of the coal seam surface according to the faults. A prototype system was developed based on this method to build a coal seam model from the collected multisource coal seam data. A comparison with three existing interpolation methods shows that this method is feasible and time efficient and achieves higher accuracy than previous methods. We anticipate that the method can provide a reference for advances in digital and smart mines as well as 3D geological modeling.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)72-84
Number of pages13
JournalComputers and Geosciences
Volume124
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 2019

Keywords

  • Coal seam modeling
  • Fault simulation
  • Global anisotropy
  • Multiscale CSRBFs
  • subsurface reconstruction

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Information Systems
  • Computers in Earth Sciences

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