A stable decoupled perfectly matched layer for the 3D wave equation using the nodal discontinuous Galerkin method

In outdoor acoustics, the calculations of sound propagating in air can be computationally heavy if the domain is chosen large enough for the sound waves to decay. The computational cost is lowered by strategically truncating the computational domain with an efficient boundary treatment. One commonly used boundary treatment is the perfectly matched layer (PML), which dampens outgoing waves without polluting the computed solution in the inner domain. The purpose of this study is to propose and assess a new perfectly matched layer formulation for the 3D acoustic wave equation, using the nodal discontinuous Galerkin finite element method. The formulation is based on an efficient PML formulation that can be decoupled to further increase the computational efficiency and guarantee stability without sacrificing accuracy. This decoupled PML formulation is demonstrated to be long-time stable, and an optimization procedure for the damping functions is proposed to enhance the performance of the formulation.