Design of BIPTEM: an airborne B field IP and TEM system

The BIPTEM project was funded by several companies and developed a 1MAm2 transmitter which was tested with a concentric loop B field inductive magnetometer in 2017. A report on the system was presented at AEM18. With the rotation sensing and inertial navigation technology available at that time, motion noise corrections to the collected data did not perform well enough to justify further substantial investment and the project was mothballed. Following improvements in fibre-optic technology, and the announced future commercial availability of breakthrough quantum rotation sensors, Newmont funded research to improve the BIPTEM system and test its ability to map IP targets. Many experiments and flight tests were conducted, and extensive software developments were undertaken to bring the system to full operation. Parallel modelling and ground experiments showed that the optimum system for IP effect detection has a large Tx and a horizontal component Rx (separated by about 300m in the Slingram geometry.