SOME THEORETICAL ASPECTS FOR ELASTIC WAVE MODELING IN A RECENTLY DEVELOPED SPECTRAL ELEMENT METHOD

摘要

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 and by the Galerkin approach applied to a partition, in small subdomains, of the original physical domain under investigation. In the present work some mathematical aspects of the method and of the associated algorithm implementation are systematically investigated. Two kinds of orthogonal basis functions, constructed with Legendre and Chebyshev polynomials, and their related Gauss-Lobbatto collocation points, used in reference element quadrature, are introduced. The related analytical integration formulas are obtained. The standard error estimations and expansion convergence are discussed. In order to improve the computation accuracy and efficiency, 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 formula are used for the element quadrature, there is even no need for forming element matrix in order to further save memory without loosing much in computational efficiency. The element-by-element algorithm uses an optimal tensor product scheme which makes spectral element methods 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 second part will give the algorithm implementation, numerical accuracy and efficiency analyses, and then the modelling example comparison of the proposed spectral element method with a conventional finite-element method and a staggered pseudo-spectral method that is to be reported in the other work.