Identification of leaky Lamb waves for waveguides sandwiched between elastic half-spaces using the Spectral Collocation Method
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In non-destructive evaluation guided wave inspections, the elastic structure to be inspected is often embedded within other elastic media and the ensuing leaky waves are complex and non-trivial to characterise; we consider the canonical example of an elastic waveguide surrounded by other elastic materials that demonstrates the fundamental issues with characterising the leaky waves in such systems. Due to the complex wavenumber solutions required to represent them, leaky waves pose significant challenges to existing numerical methods, while methods that spatially discretise the field to retrieve them suffer from the exponential growth of their amplitude far into the surrounding media. We present a spectral collocation method yielding an accurate and efficient identification of these modes, leaking into elastic half-spaces. We discretise the elastic domains and, depending on the exterior bulk wavespeeds, select appropriate mappings of the discretised domain to complex paths, in which the numerical solution decays and the physics of the problem are preserved. By iterating through all possible radiation cases, the full set of dispersion and attenuation curves are successfully retrieved and validated, where possible, against the commercially available software DISPERSE. As an independent validation, dispersion curves are obtained from finite element simulations of time-dependent waves using Fourier analysis.
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