An explicit second order spectral element method for acoustic waves

The acoustic wave equation is here discretized by conforming spectral elements in space and by the second order leap-frog method in time. For simplicity, homogeneous boundary conditions are considered. A stability analysis of the resulting method is presented, providing an upper bound for the allowed time step that is proportional to the size of the elements and inversely proportional to the square of their polynomial degree. A convergence analysis is also presented, showing that the convergence error decreases when the time step or the size of the elements decrease or when the polynomial degree increases. Several numerical results illustrating these results are presented. Mathematics subject classifications (2000) 65M06, 65M70, 65M12 This work was supported by MIUR (PRIN 2001 “Metodi numerici avanzati per equazioni alle derivate parziali di interesse applicativo”).