Proposal of Extended Boundary Integral Equation Method for Rupture Dynamics Interacting With Medium Interfaces

The boundary integral equation method (BIEM) has been applied to the analysis of rupture propagation of nonplanar faults in an unbounded homogeneous elastic medium. Here, we propose an extended BIEM (XBIEM) that is applicable in an inhomogeneous bounded medium consisting of homogeneous sub-regions. In the formulation of the XBIEM, the interfaces of the sub-regions are regarded as extended boundaries upon which boundary integral equations are additionally derived. This has been originally known as a multiregion approach in the analysis of seismic wave propagation in the frequency domain and it is employed here for rupture dynamics interacting with medium interfaces in time domain. All of the boundary integral equations are fully coupled by imposing boundary conditions on the extended boundaries and then numerically solved after spatiotemporal discretization. This paper gives the explicit expressions of discretized stress kernels for anti-plane nonplanar problems and the numerical method for the implementation of the XBIEM, which are validated in two representative planar fault problems.