An arbitrary high-order discontinuous Galerkin method for elastic waves on unstructured meshes -: I.: The two-dimensional isotropic case with external source terms

We present a new numerical approach to solve the elastic wave equation in heterogeneous media in the presence of externally given source terms with arbitrary high-order accuracy in space and time on unstructured triangular meshes. We combine a discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method with the ideas of the ADER time integration approach using Arbitrary high-order DERivatives. The time integration is performed via the so-called Cauchy-Kovalewski procedure using repeatedly the governing partial differential equation itself. In contrast to classical finite element methods we allow for discontinuities of the piecewise polynomial approximation of the solution at element interfaces. This way, we can use the well-established theory of fluxes across element interfaces based on the solution of Riemann problems as developed in the finite volume framework. In particular, we replace time derivatives in the Taylor expansion of the time integration procedure by space derivatives to obtain a numerical scheme of the same high order in space and time using only one single explicit step to evolve the solution from one time level to another. The method is specially suited for linear hyperbolic systems such as the heterogeneous elastic wave equations and allows an efficient implementation. We consider continuous sources in space and time and point sources characterized by a Delta distribution in space and some continuous source time function. Hereby, the method is able to deal with point sources at any position in the computational domain that does not necessarily need to coincide with a mesh point. Interpolation is automatically performed by evaluation of test functions at the source locations. The convergence analysis demonstrates that very high accuracy is retained even on strongly irregular meshes and by increasing the order of the ADER-DG schemes computational time and storage space can be reduced remarkably. Applications of the proposed method to Lamb's Problem, a problem of strong material heterogeneities and to an example of global seismic wave propagation finally confirm its accuracy, robustness and high flexibility.