Discontinuous curvilinear collocated grid combined with nonuniform time step Runge-Kutta scheme for poroelastic finite-difference modeling

Abstract

For poroelastic media, the existence of a slow P-wave mode, next to the standard fast P and S waves, hinders efficient numerical implementations to propagate poroelastic waves through arbitrary seismic models. The slow P-wave speed can be an order of magnitude smaller than the fast P-wave speed. Hence, a stable and accurate simulation that can capture the slow P wave requires a fine grid and a small time step, which increases the overall computation cost greatly. To decrease the computation cost, we propose a poroelastic finite-difference simulation method that combines a discontinuous curvilinear collocated-grid method with a nonuniform time step Runge-Kutta (NUTS-RK) scheme. The fine grid and small time step are only used for areas near interfaces, where the contribution of the slow P wave is nonnegligible. The NUTS-RK scheme is derived from a Taylor expansion and it can circumvent the need for interpolations or extrapolations otherwise required by communications between different time levels. The accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method are verified by numerical tests. Compared with the curvilinear collocated-grid finite-difference method that uses a globally uniform space grid as well as a uniform time step, the proposed method requires fewer computing resources and can reduce the computing time greatly.