Discontinuous Galerkin methods with staggered hybridization for linear elastodynamics

In this paper, we will develop a new staggered hybridization technique for discontinuous Galerkin methods to discretize linear elastodynamic equations. The idea of hybridization is used extensively in many discontinuous Galerkin methods, but the idea of staggered hybridization is new. Our new approach offers several advantages, namely energy conservation, high-order optimal convergence, preservation of symmetry for the stress tensor, block diagonal mass matrices as well as low dispersion error. The key idea is to use two staggered hybrid variables to enforce the continuity of the velocity and the continuity of the normal component of the stress tensor on a staggered mesh. We prove the stability and the convergence of the proposed scheme in both the semi-discrete and the fully-discrete settings. Numerical results confirm the optimal rate of convergence and show that the method has a superconvergent property for dispersion. Furthermore, an application of this method to Rayleigh wave propagation is presented.