• Geophysics and Geophysical Exploration
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.70-79
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• 2001

The integral equation method is a powerful tool for numerical electromagnetic modeling. But the difficulty of this technique is the size of the linear equations, which demands excessive memory and calculation time to invert. This limitation of the integral equation method becomes critical in inverse problem. The conventional Born approximation, where the electric field in the anomalous body is approximated by the background field, is very rapid and easy to compute. However, the technique is inaccurate when the conductivity contrast between the body and the background medium is large. Quasi-linear, quasi-analytical and extended Born approximations are novel approaches to 3-D EM modeling based on the linearization of the integral equations for scattered EM field. These approximation methods are much less time consuming than full integral equation method and more accurate than conventional Born approximation. They we, however, still approximate methods for 3-D EM modeling. Iterative series methods such as modified Born, quasi-linear and quasi-analytical can be used to increase the accuracy of various approximation methods. Comparisons of numerical performance against a full integral equation and various approximation codes show that the iterative series methods are very accurate and almost always converge. Furthermore, they are very fast and easy to implement on a computer. In this study, extended Born series method is developed and it shows more accurate result than that of other series methods. Therefore, Iterative series methods, including extended Born series, open principally new possibilities for fast and accurate 3-D EM modeling and inversion.