  Semi-discrete Galerkin formulations of transient wave equations, either with
conforming or discontinuous Galerkin finite element discretizations, typically
lead to large systems of ordinary differential equations. When explicit time
integration is used, the time-step is constrained by the smallest elements in
the mesh for numerical stability, possibly a high price to pay. To overcome
that overly restrictive stability constraint on the time-step, yet without
resorting to implicit methods, explicit local time-stepping schemes (LTS) are
presented here for transient wave equations either with or without damping. In
the undamped case, leap-frog based LTS methods lead to high-order explicit LTS
schemes, which conserve the energy. In the damped case, when energy is no
longer conserved, Adams-Bashforth based LTS methods also lead to explicit LTS
schemes of arbitrarily high accuracy. When combined with a finite element
discretization in space with an essentially diagonal mass matrix, the resulting
time-marching schemes are fully explicit and thus inherently parallel.
Numerical experiments with continuous and discontinuous Galerkin finite element
discretizations validate the theory and illustrate the usefulness of these
local time-stepping methods.
