A numerical study of the influence of interconnected conductive paths in electrically resistive rocks

Several electromagnetic (EM) geophysical methods focus on the EM properties of rocks and sediments to determine a reliable image of the subsurface, while the same electromagnetic properties are measured in the laboratory with a wide range of instruments and techniques. None of these measurements return an unequivocal result. The hypothesis related to the presence of interconnected pathways of electrically conductive materials in resistive hosts has been studied with increasing interest in recent years, and the comprehension of phenomena that scale from the microstructures of the rocks up to field electrical conductivity measurements represents the boundary that prevents the direct comparison between laboratory data and field data. In recent years some numerical approaches have been investigated to understand the effects of interconnected pathways of conductors on field measurements, usually restricting the studies to direct current (DC) sources. Bearing in mind the time-variating nature of natural electromagnetic sources that take a role in field measurements, we numerically simulated the effects of such EM sources on the conductivity measured on the surface of a three-dimensional realistic body embedded in an uniform host by using electromagnetic induction equations. Since most real rocks are poor conductors, we modeled a two-phase mixture of rock and interconnected conductive elements (representing melts, saline fluids, sulphidic, carbonitic, or metallic sediments, etc.), randomly generated within the background host. We compared the electrical conductivity measured from a sample of randomly generated models with the electrical conductivity limits predicted by Hashin-Shtrikman bounds.