Numerical Homogenization of the Acoustic Wave Equations with a Continuum of Scales

Abstract

In this paper, we consider numerical homogenization of acoustic wave equations with heterogeneous coefficients, namely, when the bulk modulus and the density of the medium are only bounded. We show that under a Cordes type condition the second order derivatives of the solution with respect to harmonic coordinates are $L^2$ (instead $H^{-1}$ with respect to Euclidean coordinates) and the solution itself is in $L^{\infty}(0,T,H^2(Ω))$ (instead of $L^{\infty}(0,T,H^1(Ω))$ with respect to Euclidean coordinates). Then, we propose an implicit time stepping method to solve the resulted linear system on coarse spatial scales, and present error estimates of the method. It follows that by pre-computing the associated harmonic coordinates, it is possible to numerically homogenize the wave equation without assumptions of scale separation or ergodicity.