• Economic and Environmental Geology
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• v.43 no.3
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• pp.259-267
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• 2010

Resistivity logging instruments were designed to measure electrical resistivity of formation, which can be directly interpreted to provide water-saturation profile. Short and long normal logging measurements are made under groundwater level. In some investigation sites, groundwater level reaches to a depth of a few meters. It has come to attention that the proximity of groundwater level might distort short and long normal logging readings, when the measurements are made near groundwater level, owing to the proximity of an insulating air. This study investigates the effects of the proximity of groundwater level (and also the proximity of earth surface) on the normal by simulating normal logging measurements near groundwater level. In the simulation, we consider all the details of real logging situation, i.e., the presence of wellbore, the tool mandrel with current and potential electrodes, and currentreturn and reference-potential electrodes. We also model the air to include the earth’'s surface in the simulation rather than the customary choice of imposing a boundary condition. To obtain apparent resistivity, we compute the voltage, i.e., potential difference between monitoring and reference electrodes. For the simulation, we use a twodimensional, goal-oriented and high-order self-adaptive hp finite element refinement strategy (h denotes the element size and p the polynomial order of approximation within each element) to obtain accurate simulation results. Numerical results indicate that distortion on the normal logging is greater when the reference potential electrode is closer to the borehole and distortions on long normal logging are larger than those on short normal logging.