Serpentine: Finite Difference Methods for Wave Propagation in Second Order Formulation

Wave propagation phenomena are important in many DOE applications such as nuclear explosion monitoring, geophysical exploration, estimating ground motion hazards and damage due to earthquakes, non-destructive testing, underground facilities detection, and acoustic noise propagation. There are also future applications that would benefit from simulating wave propagation, such as geothermal energy applications and monitoring sites for carbon storage via seismic reflection techniques. In acoustics and seismology, it is of great interest to increase the frequency bandwidth in simulations. In seismic exploration, greater frequency resolution enables shorter wave lengths to be included in the simulations, allowing for better resolution in the seismic imaging. In nuclear explosion monitoring, higher frequency seismic waves are essential for accurate discrimination between explosions and earthquakes. When simulating earthquake induced motion of large structures, such as nuclear power plants or dams, increased frequency resolution is essential for realistic damage predictions. Another example is simulations of micro-seismic activity near geothermal energy plants. Here, hydro-fracturing induces many small earthquakes and the time scale of each event is proportional to the square root of the moment magnitude. As a result, the motion is dominated by higher frequencies for smaller seismic events. The above wave propagation problems are all governed by systems of hyperbolic partial differential equations in second order differential form, i.e., they contain second order partial derivatives of the dependent variables. Our general research theme in this project has been to develop numerical methods that directly discretize the wave equations in second order differential form. The obvious advantage of working with hyperbolic systems in second order differential form, as opposed to rewriting them as first order hyperbolic systems, is that the number of differential equations in the second order system is significantly smaller. Another issue with re-writing a second order system into first order form is that compatibility conditions often must be imposed on the first order form. These (Saint-Venant) conditions ensure that the solution of the first order system also satisfies the original second order system. However, such conditions can be difficult to enforce on the discretized equations, without introducing additional modeling errors. This project has previously developed robust and memory efficient algorithms for wave propagation including effects of curved boundaries, heterogeneous isotropic, and viscoelastic materials. Partially supported by internal funding from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, many of these methods have been implemented in the open source software WPP, which is geared towards 3-D seismic wave propagation applications. This code has shown excellent scaling on up to 32,768 processors and has enabled seismic wave calculations with up to 26 Billion grid points. TheWPP calculations have resulted in several publications in the field of computational seismology, e.g.. All of our current methods are second order accurate in both space and time. The benefits of higher order accurate schemes for wave propagation have been known for a long time, but have mostly been developed for first order hyperbolic systems. For second order hyperbolic systems, it has not been known how to make finite difference schemes stable with free surface boundary conditions, heterogeneous material properties, and curvilinear coordinates. The importance of higher order accurate methods is not necessarily to make the numerical solution more accurate, but to reduce the computational cost for obtaining a solution within an acceptable error tolerance. This is because the accuracy in the solution can always be improved by reducing the grid size h. However, in practice, the available computational resources might not be large enough to solve the problem with a low order method