An affine generalized optimal scheme with improved free-surface expression using adaptive strategy for frequency-domain elastic wave equation

Effective frequency-domain numerical schemes were central for forward modeling and inversion of the elastic wave equation. The rotated optimal nine-point scheme was a highly used finite-difference numerical scheme. This scheme made a weighted average of the derivative terms of the elastic wave equations in the original and the rotated coordinate systems. In comparison with the classical nine-point scheme, it could simulate S-waves better and had higher accuracy at nearly the same computational cost. Nevertheless, this scheme limited the rotation angle to 45°; thus, the grid sampling intervals in the x- and z-directions needed to be equal. Otherwise, the grid points would not lie on the axes, which dramatically complicates the scheme. Affine coordinate systems did not constrain axes to be perpendicular to each other, providing enhanced flexibility. Based on the affine coordinate transformations, we developed a new affine generalized optimal nine-point scheme. At the free surface, we applied the improved free-surface expression with an adaptive parameter-modified strategy. The new optimal scheme had no restriction that the rotation angle must be 45°. Dispersion analysis found that our scheme could effectively reduce the required number of grid points per shear wavelength for equal and unequal sampling intervals compared to the classical nine-point scheme. Moreover, this reduction improved with the increase of Poisson’s ratio. Three numerical examples demonstrated that our scheme could provide more accurate results than the classical nine-point scheme in terms of the internal and the free-surface grid points.

Pseudoelastic pure P-mode wave equation

We have developed a pseudoelastic wave equation describing pure pressure waves propagating in elastic media. The pure pressure-mode (P-mode) wave equation uses all of the elastic parameters (such as density and the P- and S-wave velocities). It produces the same amplitude variation with offset (AVO) effects as PP-reflections computed by the conventional elastic wave equation. Because the new wave equation is free of S-waves, it does not require finer grids for simulation. This leads to a significant computational speedup when the ratio of pressure to S-wave velocities is large. We test the performance of our method on a simple synthetic model with high-velocity contrasts. The amplitude admitted by the pseudoelastic pure P-mode wave equation is highly consistent with that associated with the conventional elastic wave equation over a large range of incidence angles. We further verify our method’s robustness and accuracy using a more complex and realistic 2D salt model from the SEG Advanced Modeling Program. The ideal AVO behavior and computational advantage make our wave equation a good candidate as a forward simulation engine for performing elastic full-waveform inversion, especially for marine streamer data sets.

Spatial Mesh Refinement using Cubic Smoothing Spline Interpolation in Simulation of 2-D Elastic Wave Equation: Forward Modeling of Full-waveform Inversion

Full-waveform inversion (FWI) is a non-destructive health monitoring technique that can be used to identify and quantify the embedded anomalies. The forward modeling of the FWI consists of a simulation of elastic wave equation to generate synthetic data. Thus the accuracy of the FWI method highly depends on the simulation method used in the forward modeling. Simulation of a 3-D seismic survey with small-scale heterogeneities is impossible with the classic finite difference approach even on modern super computers. In this work, we adopted a mesh refinement approach for simulation of the wave equation in the presence of small-scale heterogeneities. This approach uses cubic smoothing spline interpolation for spatial mesh refinement step in solving the wave equation. The simulation results for the 2-D elastic wave equation are presented and compared with the classic finite difference approach.

Uncertainty quantification of dynamic earthquake rupture simulations

We present a tutorial demonstration using a surrogate-model based uncertainty quantification (UQ) approach to study dynamic earthquake rupture on a rough fault surface. The UQ approach performs model calibration where we choose simulation points, fit and validate an approximate surrogate model or emulator, and then examine the input space to see which inputs can be ruled out from the data. Our approach relies on the mogp_emulator package to perform model calibration, and the FabSim3 component from the VECMA toolkit to streamline the workflow, enabling users to manage the workflow using the command line to curate reproducible simulations on local and remote resources. The tools in this tutorial provide an example template that allows domain researchers that are not necessarily experts in the underlying methods to apply them to complex problems. We illustrate the use of the package by applying the methods to dynamic earthquake rupture, which solves the elastic wave equation for the size of an earthquake and the resulting ground shaking based on the stress tensor in the Earth. We show through the tutorial results that the method is able to rule out large portions of the input parameter space, which could lead to new ways to constrain the stress tensor in the Earth based on earthquake observations. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Reliability and reproducibility in computational science: implementing verification, validation and uncertainty quantification in silico ’.

Application of an Improved Ultrasound Full-Waveform Inversion in Bone Quantitative Measurement

Inspired by the large number of applications for symmetric nonlinear equations, an improved full waveform inversion algorithm is proposed in this paper in order to quantitatively measure the bone density and realize the early diagnosis of osteoporosis. The isotropic elastic wave equation is used to simulate ultrasonic propagation between bone and soft tissue, and the Gauss–Newton algorithm based on symmetric nonlinear equations is applied to solve the optimal solution in the inversion. In addition, the authors use several strategies including the frequency-grid multiscale method, the envelope inversion and the new joint velocity–density inversion to improve the result of conventional full-waveform inversion method. The effects of various inversion settings are also tested to find a balanced way of keeping good accuracy and high computational efficiency. Numerical inversion experiments showed that the improved full waveform inversion (FWI) method proposed in this paper shows superior inversion results as it can detect small velocity–density changes in bones, and the relative error of the numerical model is within 10%. This method can also avoid interference from small amounts of noise and satisfy the high precision requirements for quantitative ultrasound measurements of bone.

Spectral enclosures for the damped elastic wave equation

<abstract><p>In this paper we investigate spectral properties of the damped elastic wave equation. Deducing a correspondence between the eigenvalue problem of this model and the one of Lamé operators with non self-adjoint perturbations, we provide quantitative bounds on the location of the point spectrum in terms of suitable norms of the damping coefficient.</p></abstract>