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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Earth Sci.
Sec. Solid Earth Geophysics
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feart.2025.1539368
This article is part of the Research Topic Experimental and Numerical Simulations of Rock Physics View all 17 articles
A Simplified 3D Finite Difference Method for Electromagnetic Logging While Drilling Simulation in Symmetrical Models
Provisionally accepted- 1 Sinopec Research Institute of Petroleum Engineering (SRIPE), Beijing, China
- 2 Southwest Petroleum University, Chengdu, China
Electromagnetic (EM) Logging While Drilling (LWD) plays an increasingly significant role in oil and gas exploration and development. Fast and accurate simulation of EM LWD is essential for optimizing tool parameters and data processing. As the depth of investigation increases, EM LWD simulation and inversion in complex geological structures become more important, while the computational cost of three-dimensional (3D) simulations remains a major challenge. In this paper, we present a simplified 3D finite-difference frequency domain method for symmetric geological models. In such models, the electromagnetic field generated by a magnetic dipole source exhibits symmetry in all directions.Leveraging this symmetry, we reduce the computational domain by half, centering it on the symmetry plane, and impose new boundary conditions based on the symmetry of the electric field. Compared to conventional methods, the proposed approach reduces the number of unknowns by half, significantly improving computational efficiency. Numerical simulations show that the results from the proposed method agree well with both analytical solutions and finite element simulations. We further apply the method to analyze borehole effects, mud invasion, and near-wellbore anomalies. The numerical results indicate that in a 12-inch diameter borehole, EM LWD apparent resistivity curves are influenced by borehole effects, deviating from those obtained under borehole-free conditions. The impact of the borehole and mud invasion varies with tool frequency and transmitter-receiver (TR) spacing: shorter TR spacings and higher frequencies are more susceptible to these effects, whereas longer TR spacings and lower frequencies exhibit greater stability.
Keywords: electromagnetic, Logging while drilling, 3d finite difference method, Half-space Computational Domain, Borehole effects
Received: 04 Dec 2024; Accepted: 25 Mar 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Li, Wu, Ni, Li, Liao, Xiao and Zeng. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Zhenguan Wu, Southwest Petroleum University, Chengdu, China
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