The WaveHoltz Heterogeneous Multiscale Method

Abstract

We consider the numerical solution of the wave equation in materials with rapidly varying coefficients, and time harmonic sources. For these problems, direct discretization is prohibitively costly, and instead multiscale methods are used. There are several multiscale methods that directly discretize in the frequency domain. In this work we instead start in the time-domain and combine a finite difference Heterogeneous Multiscale Method (HMM) for the wave equation with the WaveHoltz method. Each WaveHoltz iteration marches the wave equation towards the time-periodic Helmholtz solution. The advantages of the WaveHoltz method relative to traditional Helmholtz solvers carry over directly to the multiscale problems considered here. Since, in addition, the time-domain solver does not artificially impose boundary conditions on the micro-scale problems, no boundary errors from the micro-scale problems are present in the homogenized frequency domain solution.