Journal of the Korean Society of Mineral and Energy Resources Engineers ISSN:2288-0291(Print) 2288-2790(Online) 한국자원공학회지

In order to remove ambiguity of gravity interpretation, inversion methods with particular constraints have been suggested(Last and Kubik, 1983; Guillen and Menichetti, 1984; Barbosa et al., 1999). But these constraints inevitably restrict the type of geological setting where the method may be applied. We applied Simulated Annealing(SA) to the problem, which is one of the most powerful optimization techniques. In this paper, a gravity inversion method using simulated annealing was written and its convergence and sensitivity were tested. It obtains density distributions of underground geometry which consists of array of rectangular blocks. Model tests were also executed together with compact method(CM) and minimum moment for basin(MMB). They showed that SA usually obtained true solutions stably, although it attained a little different results by initial values, bound limits and prior informations. It was more sensitive to bound limit and prior information than initial value. CM and MMB naturally showed excellent results for isolated body and basin structure respectively. But they fell into absurd solutions for the opposite case. On the other hand, SA in this paper reached to acceptable solutions for all the given models, and obtained more reasonable solutions than CM and MMB when prior information was not given.