A high-order discontinuous Galerkin approach to the elasto-acoustic problem

We address the spatial discretization of an evolution problem arising from the coupling of elastic and acoustic wave propagation phenomena by employing a discontinuous Galerkin scheme on polygonal and polyhedral meshes. The coupled nature of the problem is ascribed to suitable transmission conditions imposed at the interface between the solid (elastic) and fluid (acoustic) domains. We state and prove a well-posedness result for the strong formulation of the problem, present a stability analysis for the semi-discrete formulation, and finally prove an a priorihp-version error estimate for the resulting formulation in a suitable (mesh-dependent) energy norm. We also discuss the time integration scheme employed to obtain the fully discrete system. The convergence results are validated by numerical experiments carried out in a two-dimensional setting. •Analysis of a dG method for the coupled elasto-acoustic problem on polytopal meshes.•Well-posedness in the continuous setting.•Stability and hp-version error estimates in a suitable energy norm.•Application to benchmarks and realistic 2D case studies.