A new mimetic finite difference scheme for solving the acoustic wave equation is presented. It combines a novel second order tensor mimetic discretizations in space and a leapfrog approximation in time to produce an explicit multidimensional scheme. Convergence analysis of the new scheme on a staggered grid shows that it can take larger time steps than standard finite difference schemes based on ghost points formulation. A set of numerical test problems gives evidence of the versatility of the new mimetic scheme for handling general boundary conditions.

Peer Reviewed