A multiscale method for wave propagation in 3D heterogeneous poroelastic media

Abstract

A new multiscale method for wave simulation in 3D heterogeneous poroelastic media is developed. Wave propagation in inhomogeneous media involves many different scales of media. The physical parameters in the real media usually vary greatly within a very small scale. For the direct numerical methods for wave simulation, a refined grid is required in mesh generation to maintain the match between the mesh size and the material variations in the spatial scale. This greatly increases the computational cost and computer memory requirements. The multiscale method can overcome this difficulty due to the scale difference. The basic idea of our multiscale method is to construct computational schemes on two sets of meshes, i.e., coarse grids and fine grids. The finite-volume method is applied on the coarse grids, whereas the multiscale basis functions are computed with the finite-element method by solving a local problem on the fine grids. Moreover, the local problem only needs to be solved once before time stepping. This allows us to use a coarse grid while still capturing the information of the physical property variations in the small scale. Therefore, it has better accuracy than the single-scale method when they use the same coarse grids. The theoretical method and the dispersion analysis are investigated. Numerical computations with the perfectly matched layer boundary conditions are completed for 3D inhomogeneous poroelastic models with randomly distributed small scatterers. The results indicate that our multiscale method can effectively simulate wave propagation in 3D heterogeneous poroelastic media with a significant reduction in computation cost.