A new high-order finite volume method for 3D elastic wave simulation on unstructured meshes

In this paper, we proposed a new efficient high-order finite volume method for 3D elastic wave simulation on unstructured tetrahedral meshes. With the relative coarse tetrahedral meshes, we make subdivision in each tetrahedron to generate a stencil for the high-order polynomial reconstruction. The subdivision algorithm guarantees the number of subelements is greater than the degrees of freedom of a complete polynomial. We perform the reconstruction on this stencil by using cell-averaged quantities based on the hierarchical orthonormal basis functions. Unlike the traditional high-order finite volume method, our new method has a very local property like DG and can be written as an inner-split computational scheme which is beneficial to reducing computational amount. Moreover, the stencil in our method is easy to generate for all tetrahedrons especially in the three-dimensional case. The resulting reconstruction matrix is invertible and remains unchanged for all tetrahedrons and thus it can be pre-computed and stored before time evolution. These special advantages facilitate the parallelization and high-order computations. We show convergence results obtained with the proposed method up to fifth order accuracy in space. The high-order accuracy in time is obtained by the Runge-Kutta method. Comparisons between numerical and analytic solutions show the proposed method can provide accurate wavefield information. Numerical simulation for a realistic model with complex topography demonstrates the effectiveness and potential applications of our method. Though the method is proposed based on the 3D elastic wave equation, it can be extended to other linear hyperbolic system. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.