Finite element based inversion for time-harmonic electromagnetic problems

Abstract

In this paper we address the inverse problem and present some recent advances in numerical methods to recover the subsurface electrical conductivity from time-harmonic electromagnetic data. We rigorously formulate and discretize both the forward and the inverse problem in the finite element framework. To solve the forward problem, we derive a finite element discretization of the first-order system of Maxwell's equations in terms of the electric field and the magnetic induction. We show that our approach is equivalent to the standard discretization of the vector Helmholtz equation in terms of the electric field and that the discretization of magnetic induction of the same approximation order is hidden in the standard discretization. We implement the forward solver on unstructured tetrahedral meshes using edge elements. Unstructured meshes are not only capable of representing complex geometry. They can also reduce the overall problem size and, thus, the size of the system of linear equations arising from the forward problem such that direct methods for its solution using a sparse matrix factorization become feasible.