Recent increase in metal demand and consumption has led to a significant increase in metal prices and in particular copper as one of the strategic elements in electronic industry. Such economical developments have resulted in attracting more investments for searching such metals worldwide. Since the globally known copper belt runs through Iran it is well understood that in order to make efficient exploratory strategies we need to apply modern equipments and techniques to exploit information hidden in raw data which are inherently noisy and incomplete. This dilemma emphasizes the need for devising new and efficient modeling methods consistent with geological settings of the studied area. In reality the geological features related to mineralization are fundamentally three dimensional. Therefore due to recent advances in computer hardware and software technology it would be much easier to apply more elaborate and complex numerical modeling techniques for solving governing equations of physical problems. There exists a number of numerical methods capable of solving such physical problems numerically among whom the most straight forward solution called finite difference method is well known for its robustness. In current study we have developed a three dimensional volume finite difference algorithm capable of solving DC resistivity and induced polarization of geophysical systems. After discretizing the equations we have programmed the devised algorithm in Matlab computing environment. The program has been tested via simple synthetic models where we know the exact solution analytically. The program performance for both accuracy and precision were satisfying giving less than 5 percent in overall models tested. In order to evaluate the applicability of employing the devised program for real world the Mazdeh copper prospect situated 25 kms south west of Natanz were simulated geophysically for both resistivity and IP data and five geophysical profiles were employed as the main case study of this research work. Since in some parts of the deposit the physical property shows two dimensional characteristics, we have checked the performance of our 3D modeling program with that of the well known 2D forward modeling and inversion program called RES2DINV. The obtained results show that the depth extent of mineralized zone is limited to 60 meters at best. Finally it is proposed to drill a bore hole of 80 meters depth at 75 degrees dip from 75 meters distance to the starting point of profile 34 to check the modeling results.
