Optimal Discontinuous Galerkin Methods for the Acoustic Wave Equation in Higher Dimensions

In this paper, we develop and analyze a new class of discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods for the acoustic wave equation in mixed form. Traditional mixed finite element (FE) methods produce energy conserving schemes, but these schemes are implicit, making the time-stepping inefficient. Standard DG methods give explicit schemes, but these approaches are typically dissipative or suboptimally convergent, depending on the choice of numerical fluxes. Our new method can be seen as a compromise between these two kinds of techniques, in the way that it is both explicit and energy conserving, locally and globally. Moreover, it can be seen as a generalized version of the Raviart–Thomas FE method and the finite volume method. Stability and convergence of the new method are rigorously analyzed, and we have shown that the method is optimally convergent. Furthermore, in order to apply the new method for unbounded domains, we apply our new method with the first order absorbing boundary condition. The stability of the resulting numerical scheme is analyzed.