Wave propagation in 2-D elastic media using a spectral element method with triangles and quadrangles

We apply a spectral element method based upon a conforming mesh of quadrangles and triangles to the problem of 2-D elastic wave propagation. The method retains the advantages of classical spectral element methods based upon quadrangles only. It makes use of the classical Gauss-Lobatto-Legendre formulation on the quadrangles, while discretization on the triangles is based upon interpolation at the Fekete points. We obtain a global diagonal mass matrix which allows us to keep the explicit structure of classical spectral element solvers. We demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the method by comparing results obtained for pure quadrangle meshes with those obtained using mixed quadrangle-triangle and triangle-only meshes.