Development of a New Multifunctional Induced Polarization Instrument Based on Remote Wireless Communication Technology

Induced polarization (IP) is the primary method used for the exploration of various metal minerals and for groundwater prospecting. The function and performance of IP instruments have significantly improved over the years; however, most instruments still have some shortcomings, such as limited data acquisition accuracy, large size, separate transmitter and receiver, complex human-computer interaction, difficult networking and remote monitoring. In this study, a novel multifunctional IP instrument system is developed based on remote wireless communication technology, which has high data acquisition accuracy, small size, lightweight, flexible and diverse functions (single instrument can realize transmission and reception), remote wireless real-time monitoring, and convenient networking of multiple instruments. We independently designed a high-precision data acquisition circuit with a noise floor of 0.29 μV and a 5-fold increase in acquisition accuracy. With an intelligent power module as its core, the designed transmitter has a maximum output power of 6 kW and can transmit stepped waves and rectangular waves of various frequencies and duty cycles. We also developed a host computer program on an Android mobile terminal based on Java, which allows users to wirelessly control the instrument through mobile phones over Wi-Fi networks. In addition, we introduced the Internet of Things technology in geophysical instruments and designed a real-time remote monitoring system for data quality and multiple instruments networking scheme based on the short message service of the BeiDou navigation satellite system and cloud service platform. Multiple tests revealed that the proposed instrument meets the requirements of field exploration.