A 3D staggered-grid finite difference scheme for poroelastic wave equation

• We present a 3D poroelastic staggered-grid finite difference scheme.
• Parallel computing is implemented to decrease the computational time.
• Communication between processors is performed by MPI.
• We analyze the numerical dispersion and stability condition.
• We give the numerical results of two 3D poroelastic models.

Three dimensional numerical modeling has been a viable tool for understanding wave propagation in real media. The poroelastic media can better describe the phenomena of hydrocarbon reservoirs than acoustic and elastic media. However, the numerical modeling in 3D poroelastic media demands significantly more computational capacity, including both computational time and memory. In this paper, we present a 3D poroelastic staggered-grid finite difference (SFD) scheme. During the procedure, parallel computing is implemented to reduce the computational time. Parallelization is based on domain decomposition, and communication between processors is performed using message passing interface (MPI). Parallel analysis shows that the parallelized SFD scheme significantly improves the simulation efficiency and 3D decomposition in domain is the most efficient. We also analyze the numerical dispersion and stability condition of the 3D poroelastic SFD method. Numerical results show that the 3D numerical simulation can provide a real description of wave propagation.