Solution of large-scale 3D controlled-source electromagnetic modeling problem using efficient iterative solvers

Abstract

With geophysical surveys evolving from traditional 2D to 3D models, the large volume of data adds challenges to inversion, especially when aiming to resolve complex 3D structures. An iterative forward solver for the controlled-source electromagnetic (CSEM) method requires less memory than that for a direct solver; however, it is not easy to iteratively solve an ill-conditioned linear system of equations arising from finite-element discretization of Maxwell’s equations. To solve this problem, we have developed efficient and robust iterative solvers for frequency- and time-domain CSEM modeling problems. For the frequency-domain problem, we first transform the linear system into its equivalent real-number format, and then introduce an optimal block-diagonal preconditioner. Because the condition number of the preconditioned linear equation system has an upper bound of [Formula: see text], we can achieve fast solution convergence when applying a flexible generalized minimum residual solver. Applying the block preconditioner further results in solving two smaller linear systems with the same coefficient matrix. For the time-domain problem, we first discretize the partial differential equation for the electric field in time using an unconditionally stable backward Euler scheme. We then solve the resulting linear equation system iteratively at each time step. After the spatial discretization in the frequency domain, or space-time discretization in the time domain, we exploit the conjugate-gradient solver with auxiliary-space preconditioners derived from the Hiptmair-Xu decomposition to solve these real linear systems. Finally, we check the efficiency and effectiveness of our iterative methods by simulating complex CSEM models. The most significant advantage of our approach is that the iterative solvers we adopt have almost the same accuracy and robustness as direct solvers but require much less memory, rendering them more suitable for large-scale 3D CSEM forward modeling and inversion.