PhD Thesis (2025-2028)

Title:  Three-dimensional kinematic model of fault networks

Advisors: Guillaume Caumon (Université de Lorraine) and Gautier Laurent (Université d’Orléans)

The overall objective of this PhD project is to advance the state of the art in the modeling of displacement associated to fault networks. The idea is to define a small number of geometric parameters that can describe the near-field discontinuous displacement of a fault network, while accounting for branch lines and interactions. After developing the numerical displacement model, the method will be tested on reference interpretations from high resolution 3D seismic data sets. After this first validation, the proposed parameterization can be considered for generating training data for AI-based seismic interpretation. In this context, an interesting question will be to measure the ability of such an extended training data base to improve the interpretation in structurally complex areas and compared to state of the art machine learning. Another pathway will be to jointly infer fault network location and slip parameters from subsurface data. This may be tested by extending existing inverse methods for isolated faults to account for interpretation picks (GODEFROY ET AL., 2018) or full waveform inversion results (RUGGIERO, CUPILLARD & CAUMON, 2024).