A unified framework for linear thermo-visco-elastic wave propagation including the effects of stress-relaxation

We present a unified framework for the study of wave propagation in homogeneous linear thermo-visco-elastic (TVE) continua, starting from conservation laws. In free-space such media admit two thermo-compressional modes and a shear mode. We provide asymptotic approximations to the corresponding wavenumbers which facilitate the understanding of dispersion of these modes, and consider common solids and fluids as well as soft materials where creep compliance and stress relaxation are important. We further illustrate how commonly used simpler acoustic/elastic dissipative theories can be derived via particular limits of this framework. Consequently, our framework allows us to: (i) simultaneously model interfaces involving both fluids and solids and (ii) easily quantify the influence of thermal or viscous losses in a given configuration of interest. As an example, the general framework is appliedto the canonical problem of scattering from an interface between two TVE half spaces in perfect contact. To illustrate, we provide results for fluid–solid interfaces involving air, water, steel and rubber, paying particular attention to the effects of stress relaxation

Periodic Homogenization and Material Symmetry in Linear Elasticity

Here homogenization theory is used to establish a connection between the symmetries of a periodic elastic structure associated with the microscopic properties of an elastic material and the material symmetries of the effective, macroscopic elasticity tensor. Previous results of this type exist but here more general symmetries on the microscale are considered. Using an explicit example, we show that it is possible for a material to be fully anisotropic on the microscale and yet the symmetry group on the macroscale can contain elements other than plus or minus the identity. Another example demon- strates that not all material symmetries of the macroscopic elastic tensor are generated by symmetries of the periodic elastic structure.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figure

Active elastodynamic cloaking

An active elastodynamic cloak destructively interferes with an incident time harmonic in-plane (coupled compressional/shear) elastic wave to produce zero total elastic field over a finite spatial region. A method is described which explicitly predicts the source amplitudes of the active field. For a given number of sources and their positions in two dimensions it is shown that the multipole amplitudes can be expressed as infinite sums of the coefficients of the incident wave decomposed into regular Bessel functions. Importantly, the active field generated by the sources vanishes in the far-field. In practice the infinite summations are clearly required to be truncated and the accuracy of cloaking is studied when the truncation parameter is modified. </jats:p

Transient thermal mixed boundary value problems in the half-space

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