Lin Weijun

An element by element spectral element method for elastic wave modeling

Abstract The spectral element method which combines the advantages of spectral method with those of finite element method, provides an efficient tool in simulating elastic waves equation in complex medium. Based on weak from the elastodynamic equations, mathematical formulations for Legendre spectral element method are presented. The wave field on an element is discretized using high-order Lagrange interpolation, and integration over the element is accomplished based upon the Gauss-Lobotto-Legendre integration rule. This results in a diagonal mass matrix which leads to a greatly simplified algorithm. In addition, the element by element examples are resented to in our method to reduce the memory sizes and improve the computation efficiency. Finally, some numerical examples are resented to demonstrate the spectral accuracy and the efficiency. Because of combinations of the finite element scheme and a spectral algorithms, the method can be used for complex models, including free surface boundaries and strong...

Some theoretical aspects of elastic wave modeling with a recently developed spectral element method

A spectral element method has been recently developed for solving elastodynamic problems. The numerical solutions are obtained by using the weak formulation of the elastodynamic equation for heterogeneous media, based on the Galerkin approach applied to a partition, in small subdomains, of the original physical domain. In this work, some mathematical aspects of the method and the associated algorithm implementation are systematically investigated. Two kinds of orthogonal basis functions, constructed with Legendre and Chebyshev polynomials, and their related Gauss-Lobatto collocation points are introduced. The related integration formulas are obtained. The standard error estimations and expansion convergence are discussed. An element-by-element pre-conditioned conjugate gradient linear solver in the space domain and a staggered predictor/multi-corrector algorithm in the time integration are used for strong heterogeneous elastic media. As a consequence, neither the global matrices nor the effective force vector is assembled. When analytical formulas are used for the element quadrature, there is even no need for forming element matrix in order to further save memory without losing much in computational efficiency. The element-by-element algorithm uses an optimal tensor product scheme which makes this method much more efficient than finite-element methods from the point of view of both memory storage and computational time requirements. This work is divided into two parts. The first part mainly focuses on theoretical studies with a simple numerical result for the Chebyshev spectral element, and the second part, mainly with the Legendre spectral element, will give the algorithm implementation, numerical accuracy and efficiency analyses, and then the detailed modeling example comparisons of the proposed spectral element method with a pseudo-spectral method, which will be seen in another work by Lin, Wang and Zhang.