Electromagnetic modeling of 3-D structures by the method of system iteration using integral equations

Abstract A new approach for electromagnetic modeling of three-dimensional (3-D) earth conductivity structures using integral equations is introduced. A conductivity structure is divided into many substructures and the integral equation governing the scattering currents within a substructure is solved by a direct matrix inversion. The influence of all other substructures are treated as external excitations and the solution for the whole structure is then found iteratively. This is mathematically equivalent to partitioning the scattering matrix into many block sub-matrices and solving the whole system by a block iterative method. This method reduces computer memory requirements since only one submatrix at a time needs to be stored. The diagonal submatrices that require direct inversion are defined by local scatterers only and thus are generally better conditioned than the matrix for the whole structure. The block iterative solution requires much less computation time than direct matrix inversion or conventional point iterative methods as the convergence depends on the number of the submatrices, not on the total number of unknowns in the solution. As the submatrices are independent of each other, this method is suitable for parallel processing.