Title: Construction of structural reference model for ERT data inversion in heavy metal contaminated sites surveys

Authors: Yuling Wang; Ming Wang; Shulan Gong; Ya Xu; Chen He

Addresses: Department of Information and Electrical Engineering, Shandong Jianzhu University, Jinan, 250101, China ' Department of Information and Electrical Engineering, Shandong Jianzhu University, Jinan, 250101, China ' Department of Information and Electrical Engineering, Shandong Jianzhu University, Jinan, 250101, China ' State Key Laboratory of Environmental Criteria and Risk Assessment, Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences, Beijing 100012, China ' Computer Science and Engineering Department, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE 68588, USA

Abstract: Electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) surveys can provide useful information on heavy metal contaminated sites assessment. Structural reference model is introduced as a constraint to guide ERT data inversion in ERT survey. In this paper, we propose a novel method, which integrate soil physical and chemical information into structural reference model construction for ERT data inversion to improve the accuracy of inversion results. The reference model consists of two parts: contaminated area and uncontaminated area. The scope of contaminated areas is recognised using soil physical and chemical properties and the apparent resistivity data extracted from the ERT profile at the borehole location, and then the resistivity distribution of reference model is set according to the average resistivity of soil samples. The accuracy of the proposed method is evaluated with two numerical experiments. The experiment results of synthetic models show that the structural reference model constructed by the proposed method is close to the synthetic model and effectively improves the inversion results.

Keywords: structural reference model; ERT data inversion; contaminated sites survey; Wenner array.

DOI: 10.1504/IJASS.2018.096109

International Journal of Applied Systemic Studies, 2018 Vol.8 No.3, pp.218 - 232

Received: 24 May 2017
Accepted: 09 May 2018
Published online: 12 Nov 2018 *

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