Revisiting the time domain induced polarization technique, from linearization to inversion

Abstract:

The induced polarization (IP) technique has been successful in mineral exploration, particularly for finding disseminated sulphide or porphyry deposits, but also in helping solve geotechnical and environmental problems. Electrical induced polarization (EIP) surveys use grounded electrodes and take measurements of the electric field while the current is both “on” and “off”. Currently, 2D and 3D inversions of EIP data are generally carried out by first finding a background conductivity from the asymptotic “on-time” measurements. The DC resistivity problem is then linearized about that conductivity to obtain a linear relationship between the off-time data and the “pseudo-chargeability”. The distribution of pseudo-chargeability in the earth is then interpreted within the context of the initial geoscience problem pursued.

Despite its success, the current EIP implementation does have challenges. A fundamental assumption, that there is no electromagnetic induction (EM) effect, breaks down when the background is conductive. This is especially problematic in regions having conductive overburden. EM induction complicates, and sometimes overwhelms, the IP signal. To ameliorate this effect, we estimate the inductive signal, subtract it from the “off-time” data and invert the resultant IP data using the linearized formulation. We carefully examine the conditions under which this works. We also investigate the potential alterations to the linearized sensitivity function that are needed to allow a linearized inversion to be carried out.

Inversions of EIP data recover a “chargeability” but this is not a uniquely defined quantity. There are multiple definitions of this property because there are a diverse number of ways in which an IP datum is defined. In time domain IP surveys, the data might be mV/V or a time-integrated voltage with units of ms. In reality however, data from an EIP survey have many time channels and each one can be inverted separately to produce a chargeability at that time, or multiple times can be worked with at once, to obtain time dependent IP parameters. We present an approach for doing this and illustrate its effectiveness by applying it to a mineral exploration problem. The result allows us to distinguish geological units having different polarization characteristics.