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Guaranteeing the quality of the transmitting current under low switching frequency conditions is the crucial point in the helicopter transient electromagnetic (HTEM) system which affects the efficiency and exploration accuracy. HTEM requires high efficiency and low switching loss of the inverter power supply due to the facts that HTEM uses air-launched and air-received measurement methods, and the power storage capacity of the airborne transmitting system is limited. Paradoxically, low switching frequency directly affects the transmitting waveform quality and thereby affects the detection accuracy. In this study, we present a semiperiodic mirror symmetry selective harmonic elimination pulse width modulation (SHEPWM) based on the subsection control approach to balance transmitting current quality and switching loss. In the SHEPWM method, the semiperiodic mirror symmetry SHEPWM nonlinear equations are established by the time frequency domain information of the inverter output voltage and resolved by the artificial neural network (ANN) algorithm to attain switching time sequence of desired transmitting current. The simulation and experimental results verify the effectiveness of the SHEPWM subsection control strategy, which can reduce the switching loss while ensuring the current waveform quality and detection accuracy.

A distributed phase measurement method of frequency-domain electromagnetic detection is proposed. The theoretical analysis of the previous literature shows that in electromagnetic detection applications, phase as an independent measurement parameter can reduce the diversity of solution, and it also has the advantage of greater steepness than the amplitude. Currently, there are few literature dealing with the phase in the practical application of audio electromagnetic detection, because it is difficult to obtain the phase from the separated devices. A synchronization recording system is designed based on the most widely used GPS and fiducial timestamp (FIDTS) technology. The phase errors caused by FIDTS, hardware circuit noise, and FFT spectrum leakage are analyzed. In addition, the synchronization data lost by GPS can be supplemented by interpolation. To prove the effectiveness of the method, a test platform was built in the laboratory. System test results show that the synchronization error between any two systems is less than 48 ns, and the phase error is less than 0.173° at 10 kHz. The experimental result of abnormal loop shows that the phase is more accurate than the amplitude.

For surveys in areas with difficult access, ground-based electromagnetic (EM) systems are difficult to operate, time-consuming, and expensive, whereas airborne EM (AEM) systems are unsafe and uneconomic for small survey areas. We have developed a new frequency-domain airborne electromagnetic (FAEM) system called the ground-airborne frequency-domain EM (GAFEM) system to achieve rapid data acquisition in complex terrains with high safety and low cost. The system consists of a grounded electrical source and an airborne receiver carried by an unmanned rotorcraft. The grounded electrical source transmits a [Formula: see text] pseudorandom series obtaining signals at [Formula: see text] frequencies in one flight, which can maintain the resolution without reducing efficiency. The airborne receiver based on the unmanned rotorcraft makes the system flexible, convenient, and economical to operate in areas with difficult access. The system can conduct surveys in far- and non-far-field regions and can obtain the apparent resistivity to present a quick overview of the subsurface structure. To demonstrate the GAFEM system’s effectiveness and practical detection potential, we have performed two field surveys that revealed the shallow structure with tunnels and the deep structure at source-receiver distances of 3 and 6 km, respectively. The GAFEM system effectively revealed the apparent-resistivity difference with a sufficient investigation depth at large source-receiver distances. Thus, the system can be extended to various important applications for rapid surveys or deep investigations in areas with difficult access.

In the semi-aviation frequency-domain electromagnetic measurement, the induction air-core coil and the differential pre-amplifier circuit introduce noise, which affects the sensor and results in receiving weak signals and improving the signal-to-noise ratio of the system. In response to this problem, by analyzing the physical structure of the air-core coil sensor and the mechanism of the amplification circuit, combined with the simulation and experimental tests of voltage noise, current noise, resistance noise and other noise components, analyzed that the thermal noise is the main component of the sensor noise in the system frequency band, but directly removing the matching resistor increases the instability of the circuit, causes the coil to work in an underdamped state, and generates a time domain oscillation at the resonant frequency, source impedance analysis and analysis of differential pre-amplifier circuit in the frequency-domain detection method, abandoning the matching resistance scheme and magnetic flux negative feedback scheme. The matching capacitor is added to make the receiver detect the frequency range in the 1&ndash, 10 kHz range. In normal operation, the noise level reaches 10 nV level, which not only increases the stability of the circuit, but also reduces the noise of the sensor. It has far-reaching significance for the detection of weak frequency signals.

The wire loop method of the transient electromagnetic (TEM) method is used to nondestructively detect conductor breaks of grounding grid. For this purpose, grounding grids serve as an underground wire loop, and the measuring points are arranged on the ground. At each measuring point, a receiving loop is employed to detect the electromagnetic response generated by transmitting the current of the transmitting loop. Conductor breaks can be diagnosed by analyzing the slices of the electromagnetic response. We study the effect of loop size and height difference through the simulation of an intact 2×2 grounding grid, confirming that it is easier to obtain the topological structure using a small transmitting loop and a small height difference. Furthermore, simulations of an intact 4×4 grounding grid and grids with different locations of conductor breaks are also conducted with a small transmitting loop. It is easy to distinguish the topological structure of the grounding grid and the locations of conductor breaks. Finally, the detection method is applied experimentally. The experimental results confirm that the proposed method is an effective technique for conductor break diagnosis.