A time explicit multiscale framework for heterogeneous elastic wave propagation based on multipoint stress discretization
Abstract
Simulating elastic wave propagation in heterogeneous media presents significant mathematical and computational challenges, since resolving fine-scale material variations requires extremely fine spatial discretizations, while mixed stress--displacement formulations typically lead to large saddle-point systems that are not well suited for efficient time integration. Moreover, conventional multiscale reductions generally produce nontrivial coarse mass matrices, thereby requiring additional linear solves at every time step and diminishing the advantages of explicit schemes. To address these difficulties, we develop a time explicit multiscale method based on a multipoint stress control volume discretization. The central innovation is a unified spatial--temporal reduction strategy that simultaneously removes two dominant algebraic bottlenecks: the complex global fine-scale mixed solve and the repeated coarse-scale mass solve arising in conventional multiscale time stepping. More specifically, the stress and auxiliary rotation variables are eliminated locally, leading to a symmetric positive definite reduced stiffness operator, upon which a multiscale space is constructed using a density-weighted local spectral problem. The associated projected mass bilinear form preserves the physical mass inner product and gives an identity mass matrix under a density-orthonormal auxiliary basis, leading naturally to an explicit central-difference scheme. We establish discrete energy stability under a coarse-scale CFL condition and derive convergence estimates for both the density-weighted displacement and the locally recovered stress. Numerical experiments in heterogeneous media validate the theoretical results and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for elastic wave propagation.
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BibTeX
@misc{zhong2026time,
title = {{A time explicit multiscale framework for heterogeneous elastic wave propagation based on multipoint stress discretization}},
author = {Xiang Zhong and Eric T. Chung and Shubin Fu},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.14954},
eprint = {2609.14954},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.14954},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - A time explicit multiscale framework for heterogeneous elastic wave propagation based on multipoint stress discretization
AU - Xiang Zhong
AU - Eric T. Chung
AU - Shubin Fu
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/14
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.14954
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.14954
AB - Simulating elastic wave propagation in heterogeneous media presents significant mathematical and computational challenges, since resolving fine-scale material variations requires extremely fine spatial discretizations, while mixed stress--displacement formulations typically lead to large saddle-point systems that are not well suited for efficient time integration. Moreover, conventional multiscale reductions generally produce nontrivial coarse mass matrices, thereby requiring additional linear solves at every time step and diminishing the advantages of explicit schemes. To address these difficulties, we develop a time explicit multiscale method based on a multipoint stress control volume discretization. The central innovation is a unified spatial--temporal reduction strategy that simultaneously removes two dominant algebraic bottlenecks: the complex global fine-scale mixed solve and the repeated coarse-scale mass solve arising in conventional multiscale time stepping. More specifically, the stress and auxiliary rotation variables are eliminated locally, leading to a symmetric positive definite reduced stiffness operator, upon which a multiscale space is constructed using a density-weighted local spectral problem. The associated projected mass bilinear form preserves the physical mass inner product and gives an identity mass matrix under a density-orthonormal auxiliary basis, leading naturally to an explicit central-difference scheme. We establish discrete energy stability under a coarse-scale CFL condition and derive convergence estimates for both the density-weighted displacement and the locally recovered stress. Numerical experiments in heterogeneous media validate the theoretical results and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for elastic wave propagation.
ER -