Generalized Galerkin approximations of elastic waves with absorbing boundary conditions Original Research Article

For the propagation of elastic waves in unbounded domains, absorbing boundary conditions (ABCs) at the fictitious numerical boundaries have been proposed. In this paper we focus on both first- and second-order ABCs in the framework of variational (weak) approximations, like those stemming from Galerkin method (or its variants) for finite element or spectral approximations [1]. In particular, we recover first order conditions as natural (or Neumann) conditions, whereas we propose a penalty residual method for the treatment of second order ABCs. The time discretization is based on implicit backward finite differences, whereas we use spectral Legendre collocation methods set in a variational form for the spatial discretization (treatment of finite element or spectral element approximations is completely similar). Numerical experiments exhibit that the present formulation of second-order ABCs improves the one based on first-order ABCs with regard to both the reduction of the total energy in the computational domain, and the Fourier spectrum of the displacement field at selected points of the elastic medium. A stability analysis is developed for the variational problem in the continuous case both for first- and second-order ABCs. A suitable treatment of ABCs at corners is also proposed.