Arbitrary high-order finite volume schemes for seismic wave propagation on unstructured meshes in 2D and 3D

SUMMARY We present a new numerical method to solve the heterogeneous anelastic seismic wave equations with arbitrary high order of accuracy in space and time on unstructured triangular and tetrahedral meshes in two and three space dimensions, respectively. Using the velocity–stress formulation provides a linear hyperbolic system of equations with source terms that 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. The proposed method relies on the finite volume (FV) approach where cell-averaged quantities are evolved in time by computing numerical fluxes at the element interfaces. The basic ingredient of the numerical flux function is the solution of Generalized Riemann Problems at the element interfaces according to the arbitrary high-order derivatives (ADER) approach of  Toro et al., where the initial data is piecewise polynomial instead of piecewise constant as it was in the original first-order FV scheme developed by Godunov. The ADER approach automatically produces a scheme of uniformly high order of accuracy in space and time. The high-order polynomials in space, needed as input for the numerical flux function, are obtained using a reconstruction operator acting on the cell averages. This reconstruction operator uses some techniques originally developed in the Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) Finite Element framework, namely hierarchical orthogonal basis functions in a reference element. In particular, in this article we pay special attention to underline the differences as well as the points in common with the ADER-DG schemes previously developed by the authors, especially concerning the MPI parallelization of both methods. The numerical convergence analysis demonstrates that the proposed FV schemes provide very high order of accuracy even on unstructured tetrahedral meshes while computational cost for a desired accuracy can be reduced when applying higher order reconstructions. Applications to a series of well-acknowledged elastic and anelastic test cases and comparisons with analytic and numerical reference solutions, obtained by different well-established numerical methods, confirm the performance of the proposed method. Therefore, the development of the highly accurate ADER-FV approach for tetrahedral meshes including viscoelastic material provides a novel, flexible and efficient numerical technique to approach 3-D wave propagation problems including realistic attenuation and complex geometry.