NJIT Applied Mathematics Colloquium

Friday, March 2, 2012, 11:30am

Cullimore Lecture Hall II
New Jersey Institute of Technology



Multiscale Modeling and Analysis of the Wave Equation

Susan Minkoff
University of Maryland at Baltimore County

Imaging the Earth's subsurface requires determination of the "important information" inherent in data that ranges over multiple scales. While numerical upscaling is a common approach for speeding up solution of the fluid flow equations, simulation of waves through the same Earth is generally accomplished using single scale finite differences. We describe a two-scale finite-element based wave simulator and the associated adjoint problem used for inversion.
Operator-based upscaling decomposes the solution into coarse and subgrid components.
Fine-scale solution information is incorporated in the coarse solution. I will describe adapting operator-based upscaling to the acoustic and elastic wave equations in 2 and 3D, and will
give a matrix analysis of this two-stage process that produces an explanation of the underlying physical equations being solved by this technique. We see that the coarse grid solution involves solving a matrix problem with entries that are averages of the original parameter field on coarse grid boundaries. Calculation of the adjoint for the upscaled wave equation simulator is
straight-forward if differentiation of the continuous pde model is accomplished before
discretization. The result is that the adjoint problem can be solved by the same upscaling method as the standard acoustic wave equation.