Generalized stiffness reduction method to remove the artificial edge-effects for seismic wave modelling in elastic anisotropic media

Abstract

SUMMARY In seismic wave modelling, the boundary reflections caused by the computational grid edges should be reduced to produce accurate simulation results. The perfectly matched layer (PML) method is one of the popular techniques to suppress such artificial reflections, because it can be easily applied to the first-order wave equation in many numerical methods. However, one issue of the PML method is that the stability condition might be violated in complex elastic anisotropic media. In these cases, the PML method will not attenuate the boundary reflections but rather introduce strong artefacts in the simulation results. To tackle this problem, we propose a generalized stiffness reduction method (GSRM) as a substitute for the PML method. We first derive the stability conditions of the PML method and analyse the suitable conditions for their application to time- and frequency-domain seismic wave modelling. Then, we develop a simple and effective numerical implementation of the GSRM to attenuate the boundary reflections and apply it to seismic wave modelling in elastic anisotropic media. We give some numerical experiments to demonstrate the feasibility and advantages of the GSRM compared to the PML method. Numerical examples show the GSRM is conceptually simpler, more computationally efficient and more straightforward in terms of numerical implementation than the PML method for seismic modelling using either first- or second-order time- and frequency-domain wave equations.