Marie Bonnasse defended her PhD

“Simulation of elastic wave propagation in time harmonic domain using discontinuous Galerkin methods”

The scientific context of this thesis is seismic imaging which aims at recovering the structure of the earth. As the drilling is expensive, the petroleum industry is interested by methods able to reconstruct images of the internal structures of the earth before the drilling. The most used seismic imaging method in petroleum industry is the seismic-reflection technique which uses a wave equation model. Seismic imaging is an inverse problem which requires to solve a large number of forward problems. In this context, we are interested in this thesis in the modeling part, i.e. the resolution of the forward problem, assuming a time-harmonic regime, leading to the so-called Helmholtz equations. The main objective is to propose and develop a new finite element (FE) type solver characterized by a reduced-size discrete operator (as compared to existing such solvers) without hampering the accuracy of the numerical solution. We consider the family of discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods. However, as classical DG methods are much more expensive than continuous FE methods when considering steady-like problems, because of an increased number of coupled degrees of freedom as a result of the discontinuity of the approximation, we develop a new form of DG method that specifically address this issue: the hybridizable DG (HDG) method. To validate the efficiency of the proposed HDGm, we compare the results that we obtain with those of a classical upwind flux-based DG method in a 2D framework. Then, as petroleum industry is interested in the treatment of real data, we develop the HDG method for the 3D elastic Helmholtz equations.