PERFECTLY MATCHED LAYERS FOR ELASTODYNAMICS: A NEW ABSORBING BOUNDARY CONDITION

Abstract

The use of perfectly matched layers (PML) has recently been introduced by Berenger as a material absorbing boundary condition (ABC) for electromagnetic waves. In this paper, we will first prove that a fictitious elastodynamic material half-space exists that will absorb an incident wave for all angles and all frequencies. Moreover, the wave is attenuative in the second half-space. As a consequence, layers of such material could be designed at the edge of a computer simulation region to absorb outgoing waves. Since this is a material ABC, only one set of computer codes is needed to simulate an open region. Hence, it is easy to parallelize such codes on multiprocessor computers. For instance, it is easy to program massively parallel computers on the SIMD (single instruction multiple data) mode for such codes. We will show two- and three-dimensional computer simulations of the PML for the linearized equations of elastodynamics. Comparison with Liao’s ABC will be given.