A finite-volume solution to the geophysical electromagnetic forward problem using unstructured grids

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe application of unstructured grids can improve the solution of total field electromagnetic problems because these grids allow efficient local refinement of the mesh at the locations of high field gradients. Unstructured grids also provide the flexibility required for representing arbitrary topography and subsurface interfaces. We investigated the generalization of the standard Yee’s staggered scheme to unstructured tetrahedral-Voronoi grids using a finite-volume approach. We discretized the Helmholtz equation for the electric field in the frequency domain and solved the problem to find the projection of the total electric field along the edges of the tetrahedral elements. To compute the electric and magnetic fields at the observation points, an interpolation technique was employed, which uses the edge vector interpolation functions of the tetrahedral elements. To verify the presented scheme, two examples were evaluated, which revealed the computation of the total and secondary fields due to ele...