Adaptive filtering of microseismic data for monitoring a water-conducting fractured zone in a mine

Water-conducting fractured zones in a rock mass can cause problems in mining. Attempts have been made to monitor their development using microseismic signals. However, due to the lack of prior information, it is difficult to filter out mixed low-frequency interference with traditional denoising methods. In this work, the proposed adaptive filtering algorithm is applied after the wavelet packets are decomposed. It is based on a cross-correlation analysis. The algorithm takes a high-quality signal in the common source waveform as prior information and applies the corresponding correlation coefficients between subbands as a threshold. The algorithm was verified with simulations. The results show that low-frequency interference can be effectively suppressed by filtering. For single-frequency interference, the signal-to-noise ratio increased from − 10.18 to 13.97, and the root-mean-square error was 43.88. For multi-frequency interference, it increased from − 10.01 and − 2.63 to 13.50 and 7.99. The root-mean-square errors were 46.31 and 138.07. The narrower the main frequency band of the interference signal and the less the overlap of the main frequency band of the interference signal and the effective signal, the better the filtering effect. When the algorithm was applied to microseismic data collected in the field, the number of effective channels increased and the accuracy improved. The development of a water-conducting fractured zone in the field was consistent with the microseismic location obtained after interference was removed by the algorithm, which indicates that it is feasible to monitor a water-conducting fractured zone by analyzing microseismic waveforms with the adaptive filtering algorithm.