2-D magnetotelluric modeling using finite element method incorporating unstructured quadrilateral elements

Abstract

In this research, the finite element (FE) method incorporating quadrilateral elements for solving 2-D MT modeling was presented. The finite element software was developed, employing a paving algorithm to generate the unstructured quadrilateral mesh. The accuracy, efficiency, reliability, and flexibility of our FE forward modeling are presented, compared and discussed. The numerical results indicate that our FE codes using an unstructured quadrilateral mesh provide good accuracy when the local mesh refinement is applied around sites and in the area of interest, with superior results when compared to other FE methods. The reliability of the developed codes was also confirmed when comparing both analytical solutions and COMMEMI2D model. Furthermore, our developed FE codes incorporating an unstructured quadrilateral mesh showed useful and powerful features such as handling irregular and complex subregions and providing local refinement of the mesh for a 2-D domain as closely as unstructured triangular mesh but it requires less number of elements in a mesh.