An analysis of the shadow effect for the short-offset transient electromagnetic method

The electromagnetic methods based on long-wire sources, whether in the time or frequency domain, are mainly detected in the far-source zone. Because the observation array is far away from the transmitting source, the amplitude and bandwidth of the signal have a large loss, which limits the detection depth and accuracy of these methods. In the near-source zone, the loss of signal amplitude and bandwidth is relatively small, conducive to improving the detection performance. However, the complex excitation field in the near-source zone makes the observation seriously affected by the source effect. This paper mainly researched the influence of the shadow effect (one of the source effects) on the observation of the short-offset transient electromagnetic method (SOTEM), which is a near-source time-domain method. The results show that the shadow effect has relatively limited influence only on the specific observation channels of the time series of observation data. Based on this, the research on eliminating shadow effects under single / multi-source, multi location and multi polarization excitation modes is carried out. The results show that using a single excitation source with multiple polarization directions or using excitation sources with different polarization directions can improve the detection accuracy of underground targets. All of these lays a foundation for further development of the SOTEM method.