A discontinuous Petrov-Galerkin method for seismic tomography problems

dc.contributor.advisorDemkowicz, Leszek
dc.contributor.advisorGhattas, Omar N.
dc.creatorBramwell, Jamie Annen
dc.date.accessioned2013-11-06T20:25:32Zen
dc.date.accessioned2017-05-11T22:36:15Z
dc.date.available2017-05-11T22:36:15Z
dc.date.issued2013-05en
dc.date.submittedMay 2013en
dc.date.updated2013-11-06T20:25:32Zen
dc.descriptiontexten
dc.description.abstractThe imaging of the interior of the Earth using ground motion data, or seismic tomography, has been a subject of great interest for over a century. The full elastic wave equations are not typically used in standard tomography codes. Instead, the elastic waves are idealized as rays and only phase velocity and travel times are considered as input data. This results in the inability to resolve features which are on the order of one wavelength in scale. To overcome this problem, models which use the full elastic wave equation and consider total seismograms as input data have recently been developed. Unfortunately, those methods are much more computationally expensive and are only in their infancy. While the finite element method is very popular in many applications in solid mechanics, it is still not the method of choice in many seismic applications due to high pollution error. The pollution effect creates an increasing ratio of discretization to best approximation error for problems with increasing wave numbers. It has been shown that standard finite element methods cannot overcome this issue. To compensate, the meshes for solving high wave number problems in seismology must be increasingly refined, and are computationally infeasible due to the large scale requirements. A new generalized least squares method was recently introduced. The main idea is to select test spaces such that the discrete problem inherits the stability of the continuous problem. In this dissertation, a discontinuous Petrov-Galerkin method with optimal test functions for 2D time-harmonic seismic tomography problems is developed. First, the abstract DPG framework and key results are reviewed. 2D DPG methods for both static and time-harmonic elasticity problems are then introduced and results indicating the low-pollution property are shown. Finally, a matrix-free inexact-Newton method for the seismic inverse problem is developed. To conclude, results obtained from both DPG and standard continuous Galerkin discretization schemes are compared and the potential effectiveness of DPG as a practical seismic inversion tool is discussed.en
dc.description.departmentComputational Science, Engineering, and Mathematicsen
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdfen
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/2152/21979en
dc.language.isoen_USen
dc.subjectFinite element methodsen
dc.subjectNumerical wave propagationen
dc.subjectLarge-scale inversion problemsen
dc.subjectNumerical stabilityen
dc.subjectSeismic tomographyen
dc.subjectFunctional analysisen
dc.titleA discontinuous Petrov-Galerkin method for seismic tomography problemsen

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