The Potential of the Horizontal Component TEM Data in the Detection of Polarizable Mineral: Synthetic Cases

Abstract

Induced polarization (IP) effects in transient electromagnetic (TEM) measurement play a significant role in the detection of minerals, such as sulfide ore, clay ore, etc. However, due to the complex impacts caused by the polarization parameters, the structure of the earth, and the measurement system configuration, the IP effects cannot be easily measured and interpreted. We paid more attention to the vertical component of the ungrounded-TEM system in previous work; however, we will now attempt to utilize the horizontal component to enhance the precision of the measurement and interpretation. We quantitatively discussed the behavior of the horizontal and vertical magnetic fields of the towed-TEM (tTEM) system. We simultaneously introduced the vertical and horizontal components into the Jacobian matrix of the 1D laterally constrained inversion to build the joint inversion. Compared to the vertical component, the horizontal component always shows earlier and bigger sign reversals and contains more IP information. Inversion with the single horizontal or single vertical component showed poor accuracy in the deep and shallow layers, respectively. The joint inversion with both components could correct the errors. Including the horizontal component in the detection and interpretation facilitates an improved resolution for polarizable minerals.