An Improved Technique for Elastodynamic Green's Function Computation for Transversely Isotropic Solids

Elastodynamic Green's function for anisotropic solids is required for wave propagation modeling in composites. Such modeling is needed for the interpretation of experimental results generated by ultrasonic excitation or mechanical vibration-based nondestructive evaluation tests of composite structures. For isotropic materials, the elastodynamic Green’s function can be obtained analytically. However, for anisotropic solids, numerical integration is required for the elastodynamic Green's function computation. It can be expressed as a summation of two integrals—a singular integral and a nonsingular (or regular) integral. The regular integral over the surface of a unit hemisphere needs to be evaluated numerically and is responsible for the majority of the computational time for the elastodynamic Green's function calculation. In this paper, it is shown that for transversely isotropic solids, which form a major portion of anisotropic materials, the integration domain of the regular part of the elastodynamic time-harmonic Green's function can be reduced from a hemisphere to a quarter-sphere. The analysis is performed in the frequency domain by considering time-harmonic Green's function. This improvement is then applied to a numerical example where it is shown that it nearly halves the computational time. This reduction in computational effort is important for a boundary element method and a distributed point source method whose computational efficiencies heavily depend on Green's function computational time.