Graduate Seminar - 9/11, 12:00PM Duncan Hall 1064

Mario Bencomo

"My Summer Internship at Total: Waves, Waves and More Waves"

I will be discussing my summer internship at Total Exploration and Production in the USA (TEPUSA), a subsidiary of the international energy company Total.

The acoustic wave equation, which models the propagation of sound waves in elastic fluids, is conventionally used in industry for seismic imaging due to its (theoretical and computational) simplicity over the more accurate linear elasticity equations, modeling the deformation of an elastic medium or solid. The motivation of my summer work consisted of developing inversion code for the linear isotropic elasticity problem as an initial step towards the integration of elasticity into seismic imaging and its analysis thereof. In particular, I worked on code that computes common ingredients in inversion code: the forward map (solution to the elasticity equations given physical parameters), and its derivative and adjoint derivative. IWAVE and IWAVE++ provide a framework for modeling and inversion code respectively, and thus were chosen as the developing environments for this research. In this talk I will discuss my contributions to IWAVE and IWAVE++: implementation of an elastic staggered grid method with free surface condition and a perfectly matched layer (pml) option, and differentiation (and adjoint) of time step kernels for inversion code. I will also show some numerical results, including the case of a point source in a homogeneous medium, and discuss some strategies and difficulties while validating the numerical results.