THE APPLICATION OF MASW FOR GEOTECHNICAL INVESTIGATIONS: STRENGTHS AND LIMITATIONS

The Multichannel Analysis of Surface Wave (MASW) method is a nondestructive seismic method, which is widely used for geotechnical investigations; including but not limited to engineering properties of soil, variable depth to bedrock, or as a supportive geophysical tool with other geophysical tools such as ERT¹, SCPT², Borehole data etc. However, this technique has some drawbacks that can limit its utility such as the short depth of penetration, the invisible thin layers, and the lateral and the vertical averaging of the acquired field data. This study will discuss both the significant strengths and limitations of using MASW for geotechnical investigation.