Numerical Solution of Poroelastic Wave Equation Using Nodal Discontinuous Galerkin Finite Element Method

In a porous medium the seismic energy not only propagates through matrix but also through pore-fluids. The differential movement between sediment grains of the matrix and interstitial fluid generates a diffusive wave which is commonly referred to as the slow P-wave. A combined system of equation which includes both elastic and diffusive phases is known as the poroelasticity. Analyzing seismic data through poroelastic modeling results in accurate interpretation of amplitude and separation of wave modes, leading to more accurate estimation of geomehanical properties of rocks. Despite its obvious multi-scale application, from sedimentary reservoir characterization to deep-earth fractured crust, poroelasticity remains under-developed primarily due to the complex nature of its constituent equations.

We present a detail formulation of poroleastic wave equations for isotropic media by combining the Biot’s and Newtonian mechanics. System of poroelastic wave equation constitutes for eight time dependent hyperbolic PDEs in 2D whereas in case of 3D number goes up to thirteen. Eigen decomposition of Jacobian of these systems confirms the presence of an additional slow-P wave phase with velocity lower than shear wave, posing stability issues on numerical scheme. To circumvent the issue, we derived a numerical scheme using nodal discontinuous Galerkin approach by adopting the triangular meshes in 2D which is extended to tetrahedral for 3D problems. In our nodal DG approach the basis function over a triangular element is interpolated using Legendre-Gauss-Lobatto (LGL) function leading to a more accurate local solutions than in the case of simple DG.

We have tested the numerical scheme for poroelastic media in 1D and 2D case, and solution obtained for the systems offers high accuracy in results over other methods such as finite difference , finite volume and pseudo-spectral. The nodal nature of our approach makes it easy to convert the application into a multi-threaded algorithm which could be developed at parallel infrastructure. Besides the fundamental of poroelastic modeling, we also present an efficient parallel algorithm that can be implemented on GPU; preliminary results from multithreaded implementation for various mesh sizes shows a remarkable reduction in computation time over serial implementation.