Wave propagation phenomena occur in all fields of science and
engineering. Although there are several numerical methods available for
the simulation of these phenomena it turns out that particularly, the
Boundary Element Method is well suited for such problems. This volume
addresses wave propagation through linear elastic continua – an
interesting problem for civil, mechanical and geotechnical engineers. A
main aim of this work is the development of an efficient and fast
Boundary Element formulation with a time discretization based on the
Convolution Quadrature Method.A crucial task within this scheme is the
computation of the convolution weights which are commonly evaluated via
approximations of Cauchy’s integral formula. Contrary to that, in this
work closed-form expressions are developed. These expressions return
nonzero values solely in a certain range of the argument – the basis for
the construction of the efficiency improved formulation. Within this
scheme hierarchical matrices are utilized to reduce the densely
populated matrices to sparse ones.Numerical examples cover convergence
studies as well as efficiency measurements in terms of computational
effort and storage requirements. In view of the obtained results it
turns out that the formulation is capable to significantly reduce the
memory consumption as well as the computational effort. Besides some
academic problems, an additional semi-infinite half space blasting
physics problem is investigated as well.