Swaves

Swaves is a software framework for simulating mechanical wave propagation in solid media, with emphasis on seismic phenomena and education. It provides solvers for both P-waves and S-waves in two- and three-dimensional domains and supports heterogeneous and anisotropic materials, complex boundary conditions, and fluid–solid interfaces. The project aims to be accessible to students and researchers, offering a high-level scripting interface and built-in visualization to inspect evolving wavefields.

Swaves uses finite-difference time-domain and spectral-element methods. It has a modular architecture with pluggable material models, solver backends, and parallel execution via MPI and GPUs. The software emphasizes reproducibility and transparent workflows, including documentation and example datasets for common seismology scenarios such as layer interfaces and wave scattering.

Originating from academic collaborations in geophysics education in the early 2020s, Swaves has been adopted by universities for coursework and demonstrative research. It is intended as a teaching and prototyping platform rather than a production-grade simulation tool for industry-scale projects.

Limitations include numerical dispersion at coarse resolutions and stability constraints tied to timestep and grid spacing. Ongoing development seeks more material models, improved boundary conditions, and better integration with data-analysis pipelines. See also Seismic wave, S-wave, P-wave, finite-difference time-domain, spectral element method.