Approximating the Performance of a Time-Domain Pulsed Induction EMI Sensor with Multiple Frequency-Domain FEM Simulations for Improved Modelling of Arctic Sea-Ice Thickness

One of the key challenges with developing pulsed induction (PI) electromagnetic induction (EMI) sensors for use in the Arctic is the inaccessibility of the environment, which makes in situ testing prohibitively expensive. To mitigate this, sensor development can be streamlined through the creation of a robust simulation strategy with which to optimize features such as coil turns and geometry. Building on work that previously presented a method for simulating an Arctic PI sensor via a time-domain finite element model (FEM), this paper presents a method for approximating a time-domain simulation with multiple frequency-domain simulations. A comparison between the fast Fourier transform (FFT) of a time-domain simulation and a collection of frequency-domain simulations is presented. These are validated against empirical data with a PI sensor over seawater, with an air gap used as a proxy for sea ice. Using the method described, a range of coils is simulated with dimensions from 0.5×0.5 m up to 1.0×2.0 m, demonstrating the ability of this approach to enable comparison of sensor performance over a wider parameter space. For a parametric sweep over 10 sensor-to-seawater lift-off distances, the improvement from the time-domain simulation (of a 402 μs window) to the frequency-domain simulation (comprising 100 discrete frequencies) represents a reduction in simulation time from 38,013 min to 141 min.