High order discretization of seismic waves-problems based upon DG-SE methods

International audienceHybrid meshes comprised of hexahedras and te-trahedras are particularly interesting for representing media with local complex geometrical features like the seabed in offshore applications. We develop a coupled finite element method for solving elasto-acoustic wave equations. It combines Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) finite elements for solving elastodynamics with spectral finite elements (SE) for solving the acoustic wave equation. SE method has demonstrated very good performances in 3D with hexahedral meshes and contributes to reduce the computational burden by having less discrete unknowns than DG. The implementation of the method is performed both in 2D and 3D and it turns out that the coupling contributes to reduce the computational costs significantly: for the same time step and the same elementary mesh size, the CPU time of the coupled method is almost halved when compared to the one of a full DG method