Piezoelectric geophone: a review from principle to performance

Real-time monitoring of seismic information is important, a wide variety of geophones have emerged to achieve this goal. According to the principle of transforming seismic signals, the geophones can be classified into electromagnetic geophones, piezoelectric geophones, electrochemical geophones, fiber optic geophones and so on. Among them, piezoelectric geophones have been widely used in seismic detection. In this article, the piezoelectric material is briefly introduced at first, and then the piezoelectric seismic detector with piezoelectric ceramic and polyvinylidene fluoride as a sensitive material is involved. After analyzing the electrical equivalent model of the piezoelectric sensitive unit, the signal conditioning circuit of the piezoelectric geophone is summarized as well. After that, the promotion of MEMS technology to piezoelectric geophones is discussed. Finally, a summary of all the work listed in this article is given and an outlook of combining MEMS and PVDF to improve the performance of geophones is proposed.