Three-Dimensional Wide-Band Electromagnetic Forward Modelling Using Potential Technique

Abstract

The efficacy of Krylov subspace solvers is strongly dependent on the preconditioner applied to solve the large sparse linear systems of equation for electromagnetic problems. In this study, we present a three-dimensional (3-D) plane wave electromagnetic forward simulation over a broadband frequency range. The Maxwell’s equation is solved in a secondary formulation of the Lorentz gauge coupled-potential technique. A finite-volume scheme is employed for discretizing the system of equations on a structured rectilinear mesh. We employed a block incomplete lower-upper factorization (ILU) preconditioner that is suitable for our potential formulation to enhance the computing time and convergence of the systems of equation by comparing with other preconditioners. Furthermore, we observe their effect on the iterative solvers such as the quasi-minimum residual and bi-conjugate gradient stabilizer. Several applications were used to validate and test the effectiveness of our method. Our scheme shows good agreement with the analytical solution. Notably, from the marine hydrocarbon and the crustal model, the utilisation of the bi-conjugate gradient stabilizer with block ILU preconditioner is the most appropriate. Thus, our approach can be incorporated to optimize the inversion process.