General-relativistic perturbation equations for the dynamics of elastic   deformable astronomical bodies expanded in terms of generalized spherical   harmonics
  In our previous paper, based on the Carter & Quintana framework and the Damour-Soffel-Xu scheme, we deduced a complete and closed set of post-Newtonian dynamical equations for elastically deformable astronomical bodies. In this paper, we expand the general relativistic perturbation equations of elastic deformable bodies (field equations, stress-strain relation, Euler equation) in terms of Generalized Spherical Harmonics. This turns the set of complicated partial differential equations into a set of ordinary differential equations. This will be useful for numerical applications that mainly deal with the global dynamics of the Earth. 
Chongming Xu, Xuejun Wu, Michael Soffel