Elasto-acoustic wave propagation in geophysical media using hybrid high-order methods on general meshes

Hybrid high-order (HHO) methods are discretization schemes characterized by several interesting properties such as local conservation, geometric flexibility and high-order accuracy. Here, HHO methods are studied for the space semi-discretization of coupled elasto-acoustic waves in the time domain using a first-order formulation. Explicit and singly diagonal implicit Runge–Kutta (ERK & SDIRK) schemes are used for the time discretization. We show that an efficient implementation of explicit (resp. implicit) time schemes calls for a static condensation of the face (resp. cell) unknowns. Crucially, both static condensation procedures only involve block-diagonal matrices. Then, we provide numerical estimates for the CFL stability limit of ERK schemes and present a comparative study on the efficiency of explicit versus implicit schemes. Our findings indicate that implicit time schemes remain competitive in many situations. Finally, simulations in a 2D realistic geophysical configuration are performed, illustrating the geometrical flexibility of the HHO method: both hybrid (triangular and quadrilateral) and nonconforming (with hanging nodes) meshes are easily handled, delivering results of comparable accuracy to a reference spectral element software based on tensorized elements.