A study on the discrete image method for calculation of transient electromagnetic fields in geological media

Abstract

We conducted a study on the numerical calculation and response analysis of a transient electromagnetic field generated by a ground source in geological media. One solution method, the traditional discrete image method, involves complex operation, and its digital filtering algorithm requires a large number of calculations. To solve these problems, we proposed an improved discrete image method, where the following are realized: the real number of the electromagnetic field solution based on the Gaver–Stehfest algorithm for approximate inversion, the exponential approximation of the objective kernel function using the Prony method, the transient electromagnetic field according to discrete image theory, and closed-form solution of the approximate coefficients. To verify the method, we tentatively calculated the transient electromagnetic field in a homogeneous model and compared it with the results obtained from the Hankel transform digital filtering method. The results show that the method has considerable accuracy and good applicability. We then used this method to calculate the transient electromagnetic field generated by a ground magnetic dipole source in a typical geoelectric model and analyzed the horizontal component response of the induced magnetic field obtained from the “ground excitation–stratum measurement” method. We reached the conclusion that the horizontal component response of a transient field is related to the geoelectric structure, observation time, spatial location, and others. The horizontal component response of the induced magnetic field reflects the eddy current field distribution and its vertical gradient variation. During the detection of abnormal objects, positions with a zero or comparatively large offset were selected for the drillhole measurements or a comparatively long observation delay was adopted to reduce the influence of the ambient field on the survey results. The discrete image method and forward calculation results in this paper can be used as references for relevant research.