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QC 20120426

Numerical simulation of high frequency acoustic, elastic or electro-magnetic wave propagation is important in many applications. Recently the traditional techniques of ray tracing based on geometrical optics have been augmented by numerical procedures based on partial differential equations. Direct simulations of solutions to the eikonal equation have been used in seismology, and lately approximations of the Liouville or Vlasov equation formulations of geometrical optics have generated impressive results. There are basically two techniques that follow from this latter approach: one is wave front methods and the other moment methods. We shall develop these methods in some detail after a brief review of more traditional algorithms for simulating high frequency wave propagation., NR 20140805

NR 20140805

Classical homogenization is an analytic technique for approximating multiscale differential equations. The numbers of scales are reduced and the resulting equations are easier to analyze or numerically approximate. The class of problems that classical homogenization applies to is quite restricted. We shall describe a numerical procedure for homogenization, which starts from a discretization of the multiscale differential equation. In this procedure the discrete operator is represented in a wavelet space and projected onto a coarser subspace. The wavelet homogenization applies to a wider class of problems than classical homogenization. The projection procedure is general and we give a presentation of a framework in Hilbert space, which also applies to the differential equation directly. The wavelet based homogenization technique is applied to discretizations of the Helmholtz equation. In one problem from electromagnetic compatibility a subgrid scale geometrical detail is represented on a coarser grid. In another a wave-guide filter is efficiently approximated in a lower dimension. The technique is also applied to the derivation of effective equations for a nonlinear problem and to the derivation of coarse grid operators in multigrid. These multigrid methods work very well for equations with highly oscillatory or discontinuous coefficients, NR 20140805

A systematic technique for the derivation of subgrid scale models in the numerical solution of partial differential equations is described. The technique is based on Haar wavelet projections of the discrete operator followed by a sparse approximation. As numerical testing suggests, the resulting numerical method will accurately represent subgrid scale phenomena on a coarse grid. Applications to numerical homogenization and wave propagation in materials with subgrid inhomogeneities are presented., NR 20140805

In this work we propose a new set of partial differential equations (PDEs) which can be seen as a generalization of the classical eikonal and transport equations, to allow for solutions with multiple phases. The traditional geometrical optics pair of equations suffer from the fact that the class of physically relevant solutions is limited. In particular, it does not include solutions with multiple phases, corresponding to crossing waves. Our objective has been to generalize these equations to accommodate solutions containing more than one phase. The new equations are based on the same high frequency approximation of the scalar wave equation as the eikonal and the transport equations. However, they also incorporate a finite superposition principle. The maximum allowed number of intersecting waves in the solution can be chosen arbitrarily, but a higher number means that a larger system of PDEs must be solved. The PDEs form a hyperbolic system of conservation laws with source terms. Although the equations are only weakly hyperbolic, and thus not well-posed in the strong sense, several examples show the viability of solving the equations numerically. The technique we use to capture multivalued solutions is based on a closure assumption for a system of equations representing the moments., NR 20140805