New Efficient Dynamic 3-D Boundary Integral Equation Method and Application to Non-Planar Fault Geometry Dipping in Elastic Half Space

Abstract:

The boundary integral equation method formulated in the real space and time domain (BIEM-ST) has been used as a powerful tool to analyze the earthquake rupture dynamics on non-planar faults. Generally, BIEM is more accurate than volumetric methods such as the finite difference method and the finite difference method. With the recent development of the high performance computing environment, the earthquake rupture simulation studies have been conducted considering three dimensional realistic fault geometry models. However, the utility of BIEM-ST has been limited due to its heavy computational demanding increased depending on square of time steps (N²), which was needed to evaluate the historic integration. While BIEM can be efficient with the spectral domain formulation, the applications of such a method are limited to planar fault cases. In this study, we propose a new method to reduce the calculation time of BIEM-ST to linear of time step (N) without degrading the accuracy in the 3 dimensional modeling space. We extends the method proposed earlier for the case of the 2 dimensional framework, applying the asymptotic expressions of the elasto-dynamic Green’s functions. This method uses the physical nature of the stress Green’s function as dividing the causality cone according to the distances from the wave-fronts. The scalability of this method is shown on the parallel computing environment of the distributed memory. We demonstrate the applicability to analyses of subduction earthquake cases, suffering long time from the numerical limitations of previously available BIEMs. We analyze the dynamic rupture processes on dipping reverse faults embed in a three dimensional elastic half space.