A comparison of explicit continuous and discontinuous Galerkin methods and finite differences for wave propagation in 3D heterogeneous media

Abstract only.

On the time-stepping stability of continuous mass-lumped and discontinuous Galerkin finite elements for the 3D acoustic wave equation

We solve the three-dimensional acoustic wave equation, discretized on tetrahedral meshes. Two methods are considered: mass-lumped continuous finite elements and the symmetric interior-penalty discontinuous Galerkin method (SIP-DG). Combining the spatial discretization with the leap-frog time-stepping scheme, which is second-order accurate and...

A Comparison of Continuous Mass-lumped Finite Elements and Finite Differences for 3D

The finite-difference method is widely used for time-domain modelling of the wave equation because of its ease of implementation of high-order spatial discretization schemes, parallelization and computational efficiency. However, finite elements on tetrahedral meshes are more accurate in complex geometries near sharp interfaces. We compared the...

A 3D Tetrahedral Mesh Generator for Seismic Problems

Finite-element modelling of seismic wave propagation on tetrahedra requires meshes that accurately follow interfaces between impedance contrasts or surface topography and have element sizes proportional to the local velocity. We explain a mesh generation approach by example. Starting from a finite-difference representation of the velocity model,...

Efficiency Comparison for Continuous Mass-lumped and Discontinuous Galerkin Finite-elements for 3D Wave Propagation

The spreading adoption of computationally intensive techniques such as Reverse Time Migration and Full Waveform Inversion increases the need of efficiently solving the three-dimensional wave equation. Common finite-difference discretization schemes lose their accuracy and efficiency in complex geological settings with discontinuities in the...