Analytical solutions for dispersions and waveforms of acoustic logging in a cased hole

Abstract

Acoustic logging is one of the most promising methods for the quantitative evaluation of cement bond conditions in cased holes. However, inefficient utilization of full-wave information yields unsatisfactory interpretation accuracy. Fundamentally, this is because the wavefield characteristics have not been thoroughly investigated under various cement bonding conditions. Thus, this study derives analytical solutions of wavefields for a single-cased-hole model and emphasizes on the dispersion calculation algorithm. To solve the dispersion equation when solving for the poles of the propagating modes with real wavenumbers, we renormalize the Bessel function related to the borehole fluid by multiplying it with an attenuation factor. For leaky modes with complex wavenumbers, we propose a novel method to find peaks of the matrix condition number (LPMCN) in the frequency domain to determine dispersion poles, avoiding the local optimization issues resulting from the traditional Gauss–Newton iteration method. Combining these two methods, we establish a fast and accurate workflow for evaluating the dispersion of all modes in cased holes using a relatively fast bisection method to manage the dispersion of the propagating modes and employing the LPMCN method to derive dispersion curves of leaky modes. Furthermore, all propagating modes are individually investigated in the monopole measurement by evaluating residues of the real poles in a casing-free model. The analysis demonstrates that the first-order pseudo-Rayleigh wave (PR1) and inner Stoneley wave (ST1) are the two strongest modes. Finally, we focus on the waveforms and dispersion characteristics of the outer Stoneley wave (ST2) related to the fluid channel in the cement annulus. The results reveal that as the fluid thickness increases the phase velocity of the ST2 mode decreases, while its amplitude increases. Therefore, the ST2 mode can potentially evaluate the thickness of the fluid channel in a cement annulus if an effective weak-signal-extraction method is utilized.