Analysis of a high-order space and time discontinuous Galerkin method for elastodynamic equations. Application to 3D wave propagation

In this paper, we introduce a high-order discontinuous Galerkin method, based on centered fluxes and a family of high-order leap-frog time schemes, for the solution of the 3D elastodynamic equations written in velocity-stress formulation. We prove that this explicit scheme is stable under a CFL type condition obtained from a discrete energy which is preserved in domains with free surface or decreasing in domains with absorbing boundary conditions. Moreover, we study the convergence of the method for both the semi-discrete and the fully discrete schemes, and we illustrate the convergence results by the propagation of an eigenmode. We also propose a series of absorbing conditions which allow improving the convergence of the global scheme. Finally, several numerical applications of wave propagation, using a 3D solver, help illustrating the various properties of the method.