A Case Study Comparing Methods for Coal Thickness Identification in Complex Geological Conditions

Abstract

This study compares the effectiveness of different methods for coal thickness identification, aiming to identify the most accurate approach and provide a reference for intelligent coalmine development. Focused on the No. 2 coal seam in a mining area in Shanxi, China, the analysis employs well log-constrained impedance inversion and seismic multi-attribute techniques. The results show that the back propagation (BP) neural network model, as part of the seismic multi-attribute approach, delivers prediction accuracy comparable to the well log-constrained inversion method. Specifically, after applying proper static corrections, a four-layer BP neural network was constructed using four optimized sensitive attributes as the input layer, achieving an error range of 0.11% to 1.36%, compared to 0.03% to 6.59% for the logging-based method. The BP neural network demonstrated strong applicability in complex geological environments. Empirical analysis further validated the BP neural network’s geological reliability and practicality in systematic coal thickness determination.