1887
Volume 22, Issue 1
  • ISSN: 1569-4445
  • E-ISSN: 1873-0604

Abstract

Abstract

The electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) method is often challenged by the presence of reinforced concrete (RC) in urban and industrial environments, because the embedded metallic wire mesh can severely distort the distribution of subsurface currents. We investigate one typical scenario in real applications, in which an RC floor overlays the natural topsoil or rock. Our synthetic forward simulations show that the embedded wire mesh behaves like a local good conductor in data of small source‐receiver separations and acts like an equal‐potential object that keeps the potential from decaying at large source‐receiver separations. Routine ERT inversions that ignore the RC cannot work properly because the thin and highly conductive wire mesh may be manifested as large uninterpretable low‐resistivity anomalies in the imaging results. Two remedies are adopted to improve the ERT resolution in such cases. First, we find a top layer with high conductivity in our model to adequately represent the wire mesh; then, we initiate the inversion with the top‐layer model as the starting and reference model. This warm‐start approach overcomes the difficulty of recovering the large conductivity contrast between metallic objects and regular earth materials. Second, underground electrodes are added to the survey array, so more information from depth can be obtained to fight against the dominance of current channelling in the wire mesh. Finally, our strategies are used to invert a real ERT dataset from an indoor manufacturing plant, where RC covers the entire floor of the building and electrodes are in contact with the soil through open holes in the floor. Our simulation and field data inversion verify our findings and demonstrate the effectiveness of our solutions in improving the resolution of ERT when the survey is carried out over RC floor in urban and industrial environments.

Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/journals/10.1002/nsg.12285
2024-01-17
2024-12-08
Loading full text...

Full text loading...

References

  1. Chambers, J.E., Kuras, O., Meldrum, P.I., Ogilvy, R.D. & Hollands, J. (2006) Electrical resistivity tomography applied to geologic, hydrogeologic, and engineering investigations at a former waste‐disposal site. Geophysics, 71, B231–B239.
    [Google Scholar]
  2. Chambers, J.E., Loke, M.H., Ogilvy, R.D. & Meldrum, P.I. (2004) Noninvasive monitoring of DNAPL migration through a saturated porous medium using electrical impedance tomography. Journal of Contaminant Hydrology, 68, 1–22.
    [Google Scholar]
  3. Chambers, J.E., Wilkinson, P.B., Wardrop, D., Hameed, A., Hill, I., Jeffrey, C. et al. (2012) Bedrock detection beneath river terrace deposits using three‐dimensional electrical resistivity tomography. Geomorphology, 177–178, 17–25.
    [Google Scholar]
  4. Cockett, R., Kang, S., Heagy, L.J., Pidlisecky, A. & Oldenburg, D.W. (2015) SimPEG: an open source framework for simulation and gradient based parameter estimation in geophysical applications. Computers & Geosciences, 85, 142–154.
    [Google Scholar]
  5. Daily, W., Ramirez, A., LaBrecque, D. & Nitao, J. (1992) Electrical resistivity tomography of vadose water movement. Water Resources Research, 28, 1429–1442.
    [Google Scholar]
  6. Johnson, T.C. & Wellman, D.M. (2013) Re‐inversion of surface electrical resistivity tomography data from the Hanford site B‐complex. Washington, DC: Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI).
  7. Kiflu, H., Kruse, S., Loke, M.H., Wilkinson, P.B. & Harro, D. (2016) Improving resistivity survey resolution at sites with limited spatial extent using buried electrode arrays. Journal of Applied Geophysics, 135, 338–355.
    [Google Scholar]
  8. Li, Y. & Yang, D. (2021) Electrical imaging of hydraulic fracturing fluid using steel‐cased wells and a deep‐learning method. Geophysics, 86, E315–E332.
    [Google Scholar]
  9. Marinenko, A.V., Epov, M.I. & Olenchenko, V.V. (2019) Solving direct problems of electrical resistivity tomography for media with high‐conductivity irregular‐shaped heterogeneities by an example of a multiple well platform. Journal of Applied and Industrial Mathematics, 13, 93–102.
    [Google Scholar]
  10. Parker, R.L. (1994) Geophysical inverse theory. Princeton University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  11. Power, C., Gerhard, J.I., Tsourlos, P., Soupios, P., Simyrdanis, K. & Karaoulis, M. (2015) Improved time‐lapse electrical resistivity tomography monitoring of dense non‐aqueous phase liquids with surface‐to‐horizontal borehole arrays. Journal of Applied Geophysics, 112, 1–13.
    [Google Scholar]
  12. Robles, K.P.V., Kim, D.‐W., Yee, J.‐J., Lee, J.‐W. & Kee, S.‐H. (2020) Electrical resistivity measurements of reinforced concrete slabs with delamination defects. Sensors, 20, 7113.
    [Google Scholar]
  13. Rockhold, M.L., Robinson, J.L., Parajuli, K., Song, X., Zhang, Z.F. & Johnson, T.C. (2020) Groundwater characterization and monitoring at a complex industrial waste site using electrical resistivity imaging. Hydrogeology Journal, 28, 2115–2127.
    [Google Scholar]
  14. Rucker, D.F. & Fink, J.B. (2007) Inorganic plume delineation using surface high‐resolution electrical resistivity at the BC cribs and trenches site, Hanford. Vadose Zone Journal, 6, 946–958.
    [Google Scholar]
  15. Rucker, D.F. & Glaser, D.R. (2015) Standard, random, and optimum array conversions from two‐pole resistance data. Journal of Environment and Engineering Geophysics, 20, 207–217.
    [Google Scholar]
  16. Sato, H.K. (2000) Potential field from a dc current source arbitrarily located in a nonuniform layered medium. Geophysics, 65, 1726–1732.
    [Google Scholar]
  17. Tikhonov, A.N. & Arsenin, V.Y. (1977) Solutions of ill‐posed problems. New York: Winston.
    [Google Scholar]
  18. Yang, D. & Oldenburg, D.W. (2017) 3D inversion of total magnetic intensity data for time‐domain EM at the Lalor massive sulphide deposit. Exploration Geophysics, 48, 110–123.
    [Google Scholar]
/content/journals/10.1002/nsg.12285
Loading
/content/journals/10.1002/nsg.12285
Loading

Data & Media loading...

  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): engineering; ERT; inversion; resistivity

Most Cited This Month Most Cited RSS feed

This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was a Success
Invalid data
An Error Occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error