Two Dimensional Simulation of the Wenner Method with the Boundary Element Method - Influence of the Layering Discretization

Abstract

This work presents a two-dimensional boundary element formulation for the analysis of electrical potential distribution in layered soils. The analyses are focused on the simulation of the Wenner method, which is widely used for the identification of the resistivity profile of soils. This problem involves current injection and retrieval from source and sinks points, respectively, while measuring potential values in other two electrodes, with varying spacing among them. Two-dimensional (2D) analyses are limited for obtaining the resistivity profile, but can provide an interesting insight to the studied problem. Sub-regions are employed to model each layer in the varying resistivity profile. The profiles used in this work are continuous curves adapted from practical experiment results. The influence of the number of adopted layers in the numerical potential values is evaluated and the quality of the numerical results is assessed for the different types of profiles.