Finite-difference frequency-domain method with QR-decomposition-based complex-valued adaptive coefficients for 3D diffusive viscous wave modelling

The diffusive viscous (DV) model is a useful tool for interpreting low-frequency seismic attenuation and the influence of fluid saturation on frequency-dependent reflections. Among present methods for the numerical solution of the corresponding DV wave equation, the finite-difference frequency-domain (FDFD) method with complex-valued adaptive coefficients (CVAC) has the advantage of efficiently suppressing both numerical dispersion and numerical attenuation. In this research, the FDFD method with CVAC is first generalized to a 3D DV equation. In addition, the current calculation of CVAC involves the numerical integration of propagation angles, conjugate gradient (CG) iterative optimization, and the sequential selection of initial values, which is difficult and inefficient for implementation. An improved method is developed for calculating CVAC, in which a complex-valued least-squares problem is constructed by substituting the 3D complex-valued plane-wave solutions into the FDFD scheme. The QR-decomposition method is used to efficiently solve the least-squares problem. Numerical dispersion and attenuation analyses reveal that the FDFD method with CVAC requires ∼2.5 spatial points in a wavelength within a dispersion deviation of 1% and an attenuation deviation of 10% for the 3D DV equation. An analytic solution for 3D DV wave equation in homogeneous media is proposed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Numerical examples also demonstrate that the FDFD method with CVAC can obtain accurate wavefield modelling results for 3D DV models with a limited number of spatial points in a wavelength, and the FDFD method with QR-based CVAC requires less computational time than the FDFD method with CG-based CVAC.