COMPARING THE PERFORMANCE OF MULTI-COIL AND MULTI-FREQUENCY ELECTROMAGNETOMETERS FOR DETECTING BURIED METAL TARGETS

This thesis explores the use of electromagnetic (EM) methods for subsurface surveying to detect buried metallic objects, comparing the effectiveness of different EM instruments under the same field conditions. We focused on the CMD Mini-Explorer, CMD-Explorer, and GEM-2 instruments to analyze the data collected. The data were processed using EMagPy, an open-source software designed specifically for EM data analysis. This study compared multi-coil systems (CMD Mini-Explorer and CMD-Explorer) and a multi-frequency system (GEM-2), assessing their sensitivity and accuracy in detecting metallic objects. Also, the Electrical Resistivity Tomography (ERT) method was used as a reference to validate the accuracy of the EM methods. The analysis highlighted the strengths and limitations of each instrument type, showing distinct differences in performance based on their coil configurations and operating frequencies. The results of this thesis provide valuable insights into the capabilities of different EM instruments in finding targets. CMD-Mini Explorer and GEM-2 could detect shallow targets; however, Mini-Explorer could also identify deep targets in some cases in our test.