3-D direct current resistivity forward modeling by adaptive multigrid finite element method

Abstract

Based on the fact that 3-D model discretization by artificial could not always be successfully implemented especially for large-scaled problems when high accuracy and efficiency were required, a new adaptive multigrid finite element method was proposed. In this algorithm, a-posteriori error estimator was employed to generate adaptively refined mesh on a given initial mesh. On these iterative meshes, V-cycle based multigrid method was adopted to fast solve each linear equation with each initial iterative term interpolated from last mesh. With this error estimator, the unknowns were nearly optimally distributed on the final mesh which guaranteed the accuracy. The numerical results show that the multigrid solver is faster and more stable compared with ICCG solver. Meanwhile, the numerical results obtained from the final model discretization approximate the analytical solutions with maximal relative errors less than 1%, which remarkably validates this algorithm.