Section: New Results

Elastodynamic wave propagation

Sesimic wave interaction with viscoelastic media

Participants : Nathalie Glinsky, Stéphane Lanteri, Fabien Peyrusse [Department of Mathematics, Purdue University] .

This work is concerned with the development of high order DGTD methods formulated on unstructured simplicial meshes for the numerical solution of the system of time-domain elastodynamic equations. These methods share some ingredients of the DGTD methods developed by the team for the time-domain Maxwell equations among which, the use of nodal polynomial (Lagrange type) basis functions, a second order leap-frog time integration scheme and a centered scheme for the evaluation of the numerical flux at the interface between neighboring elements. A recent novel contribution is the numerical treatment of viscoelastic attenuation. For this, the velocity-stress first order hyperbolic system is completed by additional equations for the anelastic functions including the strain history of the material. These additional equations result from the rheological model of the generalized Maxwell body and permit the incorporation of realistic attenuation properties of viscoelastic material accounting for the behaviour of elastic solids and viscous fluids. In practice, we need solving 3L additional equations in 2d (and 6L in 3d), where L is the number of relaxation mechanisms of the generalized Maxwell body. This method has been implemented in 2d and 3d.

DG method for arbitrary heterogeneous media

Participants : Nathalie Glinsky, Diego Mercerat [CETE Méditerranée] .

We have recently devised an extension of the DGTD method for elastic wave propagation in arbitrary heterogeneous media. In realistic geological media (sedimentary basins for example), one has to include strong variations in the material properties. Then, the classical hypothesis that these properties are constant within each element of the mesh can be a severe limitation of the method, since we need to discretize the medium with very fine meshes resulting in very small time steps. For these reasons, we propose an improvement of the DGTD method allowing non-constant material properties within the mesh elements. A change of variables on the stress components allows writing the elastodynamic system in a pseudo-conservative form. Then, the introduction of non-constant material properties inside an element is simply treated by the calculation, via convenient quadrature formulae, of a modified local mass matrix depending on these properties. This new extension has been validated for a smoothly varying medium or a strong jump between two media, which can be accurately approximated by the method, independently of the mesh.

HDG method for the frequency-domain elastodynamic equations

Participants : Hélène Barucq [MAGIQUE-3D project-team, Inria Bordeaux - Sud-Ouest] , Marie Bonnasse, Julien Diaz [MAGIQUE-3D project-team, Inria Bordeaux - Sud-Ouest] , Stéphane Lanteri.

One of the most used seismic imaging methods is the full waveform inversion (FWI) method which is an iterative procedure whose algorithm is the following. Starting from an initial velocity model, (1) compute the solution of the wave equation for the $N$ sources of the seismic acquisition campaign, (2) evaluate, for each source, a residual defined as the difference between the wavefields recorded at receivers on the top of the subsurface during the acquisition campaign and the numerical wavefields, (3) compute the solution of the wave equation using the residuals as sources, and (4) update the velocity model by cross correlation of images produced at steps (1) and (3). Steps (1)-(4) are repeated until convergence of the velocity model is achieved. We then have to solve $2N$ wave equations at each iteration. The number of sources, $N$, is usually large (about 1000) and the efficiency of the inverse solver is thus directly related to the efficiency of the numerical method used to solve the wave equation. Seismic imaging can be performed in the time-domain or in the frequency-domain regime. In this work which is conducted in the framework of the Depth Imaging Partnership (DIP) between Inria and TOTAL, we adopt the second setting. The main difficulty with frequency-domain inversion lies in the solution of large sparse linear systems which is a challenging task for realistic 3d elastic media, even with the progress of high performance computing. In this context, we study novel high order HDG methods formulated on unstructured meshes for the solution of the frency-domain elastodynamic equations. Instead of solving a linear system involving the degrees of freedom of all volumic cells of the mesh, the principle of a HDG formulation is to introduce a new unknown in the form of Lagrange multiplier representing the trace of the numerical solution on each face of the mesh. As a result, a HDG formulation yields a global linear system in terms of the new (surfacic) unknown while the volumic solution is recovered thanks to a local computation on each element.

Multiscale DG methods for the time-domain elastodynamic equations

Participants : Marie-Hélène Lallemand, Frédéric Valentin [LNCC, Petropolis, Brazil] .

In the context of the visit of Frédéric Valentin in the team, we have initiated a study aiming at the design of novel multiscale methods for the solution of the time-domain elastodynamic equations, in the spirit of MHM (Multiscale Hybrid-Mixed) methods previously proposed for fluid flow problems. Motivation in that direction naturally came when dealing with non homogeneous anisotropic elastic media as those encountered in geodynamics related applications, since multiple scales are naturally present when high contrast elasticity parameters define the propagation medium. Instead of solving the usual system expressed in terms of displacement or displacement velocity, and stress tensor variables, a hybrid mixed-form is derived in which an additional variable, the Lagrange multiplier, is sought as representing the (opposite) of the surface tension defined at each face of the elements of a given discretization mesh. We consider the velocity/stress formulation of the elastodynamic equations, and study a MHM method defined for a heterogeneous medium where each elastic material is considered as isotropic to begin with. If the source term (the applied given force on the medium) is time independent, and if we are given an arbitrarily coarse conforming mesh (triangulation in 2d, tetrahedrization in 3d), the proposed MHM method consists in first solving a series of fully decoupled (therefore parallelizable) local (element-wise) problems defining parts of the full solution variables which are directly related to the source term, followed by the solution of a global (coarse) problem, which yields the degrees of freedom of both the Lagrange multiplier dependent part of the full solution variables and the Lagrange multiplier itself. Finally, the updating of the full solution variables is obtained by adding each splitted solution variables, before going on the next time step of a leap-frog time integration scheme. Theoretical analysis and implementation of this MHM method where the local problems are discretized with a DG method, are underway.