TITLE:
Ground Penetrating Radar Survey for the Location and Assessment of the Hydrocarbon Plumes at Gas Station Installations
AUTHORS:
Jose Vicente Fuente, Rubén Diego, Roberto Fabregad
KEYWORDS:
GPR Survey, Time-Frequency Analysis, Instantaneous Amplitude, Slice Tomography, 3D-Reconstruction, Gas Station
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Geoscience and Environment Protection,
Vol.9 No.12,
December
17,
2021
ABSTRACT: The present paper describes the implementation of GPR 3D survey for
detecting and delineating possible remains of hydrocarbon plumes on a gas station. The
3D-imaging was used for the detection of anomalous zones that were analyzed
with some relevant signal attributes extracted by digital signal processing.
These signal attributes or parameters have been the frequency of the maximum energy
concentration on time-frequency distribution and instantaneous amplitude that
could be related to the local response of the electromagnetic interaction and the presence
of hydrocarbon plumes or soil contaminated areas. The implementation methodology took place at a gas
station monitored with a piezometric sensor installation with soil layer
information. The 3D-imaging of processed data and its slicing tool permits
visualizing expected targets as pipes, tanks and installations in the subsoil
exposing the anomalous zones for refined analyses. This further processing has
used some spectral attributes of the signal to assess the real presence of the
total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH) providing a new effort to simplify and
overcome the current state of the geophysical methods able to assess the
presence of hydrocarbon plumes in industrial environments regarding the time cost of the survey and the
traceable indication of the spectral shiftment shown in the plume volume.