A contrast-source integral-equation approach for three-dimensional modeling of elastic wave problems

► A contrast-source integral equation is studied for 3D elastic scattering problems. ► The new contrast-source formulation has fewer unknowns and is more efficient. ► Algorithms have been benchmarked against the FDTD code with excellent agreements. ► Algorithms are tested with both simple synthetic models and complex seismic models. ► BiCGSTAB with a diagonal preconditioner is the fastest-convergent linear solver.