Elastic wave modelling in 3D heterogeneous media: 3D grid method

We present a new numerical technique for elastic wave modelling in 3D heterogeneous media with surface topography, which is called the 3D grid method in this paper. This work is an extension of the 2D grid method that models P-SV wave propagation in 2D heterogeneous media. Similar to the finite-element method in the discretization of a numerical mesh, the proposed scheme is flexible in incorporating surface topography and curved interfaces; moreover it satisfies the free-surface boundary conditions of 3D topography naturally. The algorithm, developed from a parsimonious staggered-grid scheme, solves the problem using integral equilibrium around each node, instead of satisfying elastodynamic differential equations at each node as in the conventional finite-difference method. The computational cost and memory requirements for the proposed scheme are approximately the same as those used by the same order finite-difference method. In this paper, a mixed tetrahedral and parallelepiped grid method is presented; and the numerical dispersion and stability criteria on the tetrahedral grid method and parallelepiped grid method are discussed in detail. The proposed scheme is successfully tested against an analytical solution for the 3D Lamb problem and a solution of the boundary method for the diffraction of a hemispherical crater. Moreover, examples of surface-wave propagation in an elastic half-space with a semi-cylindrical trench on the surface and 3D plane-layered model are presented.