Determination of electrokinetic coupling coefficients

Abstract

Electrokinetic coupling can convert an electromagnetic wave into a seismic wave or a seismic wave into an electromagnetic wave and is the basis of a new exploration method called Coupled Waves (Thompson and Gist (1993 and 1999), Hornbostel and Thompson (2002), Hornbostel, et al. (2003), and Ross et al. (2005)). Theoretically, the magnitude of the response depends linearly on the electrokinetic coupling coefficient (Pride (1994) and White (2005)). This paper describes methods to measure the electrokinetic coupling coefficients in the laboratory and presents measurements of the coupling coefficients for a range of rock and fluid types.