Mimetic discretization of the Eikonal equation with Soner boundary conditions

Motivated by a specific application in seismic reflection, the goal of this paper is to present a modified version of the Castillo–Grone mimetic gradient operators that allows for a high-order accurate solution of the Eikonal equation with Soner boundary conditions. The modified gradient operators utilize a non-staggered grid. In dimensions other than 1D, the modified gradient operators are expressed as Kronecker products of their corresponding 1D versions and some identity matrices. It is shown, that these modified 1D gradient operators are as accurate as the original gradient operators in terms of approximating first-order partial derivatives. It turns out, that in 1D one requires to solve two linear systems for finding a numerical solution of the Eikonal equation. Some examples show that the solution obtained by utilizing the modified operators increases its accuracy when incrementing the order of their approximation, something that does not occur when using the original operators. An iterative scheme is presented for the nonlinear 2D case. The method is of a quasi-Newton-like nature. At each iteration a linear system is built, with progressively higher-order stencils. The solution of the Fast Marching method is the initial guess. Numerical evidence indicates that high-order accurate solutions can be achieved.