A parallel finite-element method for three-dimensional controlled-source electromagnetic forward modelling

Abstract

We present a nodal finite-element method that can be used to compute in parallel highly accurate solutions for 3-D controlled-source electromagnetic forward modeling problems in anisotropic media. Secondary coupled-potential formulation of Maxwell’s equations allows to avoid the singularities introduced by the sources, while completely unstructured tetrahedral meshes and mesh refinement support an accurate representation of geological and bathymetric complexity and improve the solution accuracy. Different complex iterative solvers and an efficient preconditioner based on the sparse approximate inverse are used for solving the resulting large sparse linear system of equations. Results are compared with the ones of other researchers in order to check the accuracy of the method. We demonstrate the performance of the code in large problems with tens and even hundreds of millions of degrees of freedom. Scalability tests on massively parallel computers show that our code is highly scalable.