Study on the Coincident-Loop Transient Electromagnetic Method in Seafloor Exploration—Taking Jiaodong Polymetallic Mine as a Model

Abstract

The transient electromagnetic (TEM) method becomes more urgent than ever for marine exploration due to abundant resource reserves and the increasing undersea engineering construction activities, especially in the offshore exploration of mineral deposits such as Sanshandao gold mine. However, the research and application of TEM method in marine environment are still challenged by many problems. Such contradiction motivates our study on the coincident-loop TEM in seafloor exploration. The TEM response of coincident loops is firstly derived in the integral form, based on the potential functions in Helmholtz equations for a magnetic source locating in the whole-space layered model. The frequency-domain vertical magnetic field is described as the Hankel integral with double first-order Bessel functions of first kind. Secondly, the time-domain induced voltage is obtained by transforming the frequency-domain response through the cosine transform and then taking the derivative of time. To simultaneously solve the Hankel transform and the cosine transform, a novel algorithm is introduced by adapting the fixed-point quadrature and extrapolation via the Shanks transformation. Finally, a typical conductivity model for marine polymetallic deposit is designed to investigate the characteristic of TEM response under various conditions. Numerical results demonstrate that existence of conductive seawater causes the TEM response to increase significantly and decay slower. The air-sea reflected electromagnetic waves lead to a significantly large fake negative response (NR) in shallower seawater with depth less than 300 m. Increase in the height of loops will weaken and delay the anomaly response and shorten the observation time-window. The height of configuration should be no more than 100 m for shallower targets and 50 m for deeper targets, respectively. The observation time-window should cover 10-1 000 ms. Increase in the radius of loops only enhances the TEM response proportionally but hardly improves the relative anomaly. The vertical resolution on the low-resistivity target approximates 20 m for the configuration considered in the study. Decreases in D.C. resistivity and chargeability cause the positive response (PR) to increase significantly and decay more rapidly. Meanwhile, the NR is advanced and enlarged significantly and decays slower compared with the PR. The influence of time constant is not monotony and there exists an optimal value for producing the maximum NR. As the frequency parameter increases, the PR is caused to decay more rapidly without magnitude change and the NR is advanced and decays more rapidly with significant increase in magnitude. The influence of frequency parameter is more pronounced than that of time constant.