The influence of currents induced in the host rock on electromagnetic response of a spheroid directly beneath a loop

A variety of time‐domain and frequency‐domain electromagnetic (EM) methods has come into use in minerals exploration for detection of conductive ore bodies. Because the responses of these various systems differ markedly from one another, the question arises as to which is the most effective for use in discovering a buried, conductive ore body. The question can be posed as follows: What type of exploration system provides the best signal‐to‐noise (S/N) ratio, when signal is defined as the anomalous EM field caused by the presence of a target body and noise is defined as EM responses from the surrounding medium? Analytic solution of the problem is tedious and has not yet been reported in the literature. I describe some results for a special case which reduces the complexity of the problem somewhat. The case treated is that of a conducting spheroid situated directly beneath a source loop. The EM responses caused by currents in the spheroid and in the surrounding medium were computed in both the frequency domain and time domain, using the integral equation approach, supplemented with evaluations of asymptotic expression for various field components. Results show that the transient method provides the best S/N ratio of the methods considered.