A weight-adjusted discontinuous Galerkin method for wave propagation in coupled elastic-acoustic media

Abstract: This paper presents a high-order discontinuous Galerkin (DG) scheme for the simulation of wave propagation through coupled elastic-acoustic media. We use a first-order stress-velocity formulation, and derive a simple upwind-like numerical flux which weakly imposes continuity of the normal velocity and traction at elastic-acoustic interfaces. When combined with easily invertible weight-adjusted mass matrices, the resulting method is efficient, consistent, and energy stable on curvilinear meshes and for arbitrary heterogeneous media, including anisotropy and sub-cell (micro) heterogeneities. We numerically verify the high order accuracy and stability of the proposed method, and investigate its performance for applications in photoacoustic tomography.