This post has the following aims:

• Provide documentation and source code for a spherically symmetric wave propagation in a linear-elastic medium.
• Tell a story illustrating how this simple verification problem helped to validate a complicated rate-dependent and history-dependent geomechanics model.
• Warn against believing previously reported material parameters, since they might have been the result of constitutive parameter tweaking to compensate for unrelated errors in the host code. Continue reading →