Absorbing boundary conditions for scalar waves in anisotropic media. Part 2: Time-dependent modeling

Abstract

With the ultimate goal of devising effective absorbing boundary conditions (ABCs) for general anisotropic media, we investigate the well-posedness and accuracy aspects of local ABCs designed for the transient modeling of the scalar anisotropic wave equation. The ABC analyzed in this paper is the perfectly matched discrete layers (PMDL), a simple variant of perfectly matched layers (PML) that is also equivalent to rational approximation based ABCs. Specifically, we derive the necessary and sufficient condition for the well-posedness of the initial boundary value problem (IBVP) obtained by coupling an interior and a PMDL ABC. The derivation of the reflection coefficient presented in a companion paper (S. Savadatti, M.N. Guddati, J. Comput. Phys., 2010, doi:10.1016/j.jcp.2010.05.018) has shown that PMDL can correctly identify and accurately absorb outgoing waves with opposing signs of group and phase velocities provided the PMDL layer lengths satisfy a certain bound. Utilizing the well-posedness theory developed by Kreiss for general hyperbolic IBVPs, and the well-posedness conditions for ABCs derived by Trefethen and Halpern for isotropic acoustics, we show that this bound on layer lengths also ensures well-posedness. The time discretized form of PMDL is also shown to be theoretically stable and some instability related to finite precision arithmetic is discussed.