Asymptotic models for the electric potential across a highly conductive casing.

We analyze a configuration that involves a steel-cased borehole, where the casing that covers the borehole is considered as a highly conductive thin layer. We develop an asymptotic method for deriving reduced problems capable of efficiently dealing with the numerical difficulties caused by the casing when applying traditional numerical methods. We derive several reduced models by employing two different approaches, each of them leading to different classes of models. We prove stability and convergence results for these models. The theoretical orders of convergence are supported by numerical results obtained with the finite element method.