Abstract
In 3D geo-electromagnetic modeling, an adequate discretisation of the modeling domain is crucial to obtain accurate forward responses and reliable inversion results while reducing the computational cost. This paper investigates the mesh design for subsurface models, including steel-cased wells, which is relevant for many exploration settings but still remains a numerically challenging task. Applying a goal-oriented mesh refinement technique and subsequent calculations with the high-order edge finite element method, simulations of 3D controlled-source electromagnetic models in the presence of metallic infrastructure are performed. Two test models are considered, each needing a distinct version of approximation methods to incorporate the conductive steel casings of the included wells. The influence of mesh quality, goal-oriented meshing, and high-order approximations on problem sizes, computational cost, and accuracy of electromagnetic responses is investigated. The main insights of our work are: (a) the applied numerical schemes can mitigate the computational burden of geo-electromagnetic modeling in the presence of steel artifacts; (b) investigating the processes driving the meshing of models with embedded metallic infrastructures can lead to adequate strategies to deal with the inversion of such electromagnetic data sets. Based on the modeling results and analyses conducted, general recommendations for modeling strategies are proposed when performing simulations for challenging steel infrastructure scenarios.
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Data Availability
The resulting CSEM responses of the two codes for the presented models, as well as all resulting mesh and resistivity model files, are available at Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8272682). The elfe3D code will be made available on peer-to-peer basis for scientific, non-commercial purposes after Paula will have completed her PhD. The PETGEM code is freely available at the home page (https://petgem.bsc.es/), at the PyPI repository (https://pypi.org/project/petgem/), and at the GitHub site (https://github.com/ocastilloreyes/petgem)
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreements No. 955606 (DEEP-SEA) and No. 777778 (MATHROCKS). Furthermore, the research leading of this study has received funding from the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (Spain) under Project TED2021-131882B-C42. The code development of P.R. has been financed by the Smart Exploration project. Smart Exploration has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme under grant agreement No. 775971. The computations were enabled by resources provided by the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) at UPPMAX partially funded by the Swedish Research Council through grant agreement No. SNIC 2021/22-883. This work benefited from valuable suggestions and comments of Dra. Pilar Queralt (University of Barcelona). In addition, O.C-R thanks the support of Dra. Pilar who shared the experimental data of Model 2 (obtained in the scope of the GEO-URBAN project under Grant PCI2018-092943).
Funding
Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature. The work of O.C-R. has received funding from the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (Spain) under Project TED2021-131882B-C42.The code development of P.R. has been financed by the Smart Exploration project. Smart Exploration has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme under grant agreement N\(^\circ \) 775971. The computations were enabled by resources provided by the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) at UPPMAX partially funded by the Swedish Research Council through grant agreement N\(^\circ \) SNIC 2021/22-883.
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Castillo-Reyes, O., Rulff, P., Schankee Um, E. et al. Meshing strategies for 3d geo-electromagnetic modeling in the presence of metallic infrastructure. Comput Geosci 27, 1023–1039 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10596-023-10247-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10596-023-10247-w
Keywords
- Geo-electromagnetics
- Metallic infrastructures
- Goal-oriented meshing
- High-order discretizations
- Numerical solutions
- Parallel computations