Paper detail

Efficient quadrature rules for computing the stiffness matrices of mass-lumped tetrahedral elements for linear wave problems

We present new and efficient quadrature rules for computing the stiffness matrices of mass-lumped tetrahedral elements for wave propagation modelling. These quadrature rules allow for a more efficient implementation of the mass-lumped finite element method and can handle materials that are heterogeneous within the element without loss of the convergence rate. The quadrature rules are designed for the specific function spaces of recently developed mass-lumped tetrahedra, which consist of standard polynomial function spaces enriched with higher-degree bubble functions. For the degree-2 mass-lumped tetrahedron, the most efficient quadrature rule seems to be an existing 14-point quadrature rule, but for tetrahedra of degrees 3 and 4, we construct new quadrature rules that require less integration points than those currently available in the literature. Several numerical examples confirm that this approach is more efficient than computing the stiffness matrix exactly and that an optimal order of convergence is maintained, even when material properties vary within the element.