A mass-lumped mixed finite element method for acoustic wave propagation (Q777492)

A mixed finite element discretization for acoustic wave propagation is considered, which is based on the conforming approximation for velocity and pressure in the spaces \(H(\operatorname{div})\) and \(L_2\) with \(\mathrm{BDM}_1\) and \(P_0\) elements, respectively. Using an appropriate mass-lumping strategy, the resulting block-diagonal mass matrices allow an efficient time integration. The consistency error of this method is only of first order due to the perturbations introduced by the mass lumping. It is shown however that the numerical approximation still carries global second information which is used to construct piecewise linear second-order approximations for both solution components by certain post-processing procedures. The resulting scheme can be interpreted as a generalization of finite-difference time-domain methods to unstructured grids. Time-discretization is performed with the leapfrog method. Convergence analysis of the fully-discrete method is presented, including the extension of the post-processing schemes to the fully-discrete setting. Numerical tests with the plane wave propagation and the scattering of a plane wave by a cylinder illustrate the theoretical results and demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method.