Three-Dimensional Geological Modeling of Coal Seams Using Weighted Kriging Method and Multi-Source Data

Constructing high quality three-dimensional (3D) geological models of coal seams from multi-source data, such as boreholes and geological maps, is a crucial task in seam distribution analysis and production planning of coal mine. However, widely used interpolation methods in geology, such as inverse distance weighting (IDW) and ordinary kriging (OK), ignore the variety of uncertainties in multi-source data. In this paper, sample points extracted from the archival data of a coal mine were classified into two categories, the hard data and the soft data, according to their sources. Field boundaries and fault observations were also obtained from data processing. A 3D geological modeling workflow was developed to integrate these data, in which (1) the weighted kriging (WK) method was used to interpolate both hard data and soft data, and (2) a fault modeling method was proposed to build faults' geometry as well as their impact on coal seam surface model. The WK method improves the accuracy of interpolation compared with the OK and IDW methods, and the proposed fault modeling method can integrate expert interpretations into the final 3D geological model of the coal seams.