Electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) is a geophysical technique for imaging sub-surface structures from electrical resistivity measurements made at the surface, or by electrodes in one or more boreholes. If the electrodes are suspended in the boreholes, deeper sections can be investigated. It is closely related to the medical imaging technique electrical impedance tomography (EIT), and mathematically is the same inverse problem. In contrast to medical EIT, however, ERT is essentially a direct current method. A related geophysical method, induced polarization (or spectral induced polarization), measures the transient response and aims to determine the subsurface chargeability properties.
The Low Level Measurements Group conducts ERT measurements using the 4 channel ABEM Terrameter LS while an aim of this work is to enable similar measurements and charcterizations in a laboratory small scale environment.