Importance of transmitter waveform and receiver transfer function modelling in time domain induced polarization

In the computation of the forward response for Time Domain Induced Polarization the incomplete description of the transmitter waveform causes dramatic errors in the estimation of the magnitude and time characteristic of the IP phenomenon. In fact both the duration of the current pulse and the sequence of pulses used for the stacking procedure have a strong effect in the magnitude and shape of the IP decays. Furthermore, it is important to model, if present, the low-pass filters of the receivers, in order to use all the information contained in the acquired data. For these reasons, a new 1D forward and inversion algorithms have been developed using the full time decay of the IP response and the receiver transfer function to reconstruct the distribution of the four Cole-Cole parameters of the earth. The waveform implementation in the forward response for TDIP is a significant improvement that allows moving from a qualitative interpretation of TDIP data for recognition of anomaly patterns towards a quantitative analysis, able to discriminate soil lithotypes and, if present, some contamination patterns.