Diffraction of seismic waves in an elastic, cracked halfplane using a boundary integral formulation

Abstract

The presence of subsurface cracks in a halfspace excited by elastic waves may give rise to scattered body and surface waves. For many engineering applications, such as non-destructive testing or oil exploration, the scattered field may yield valuable information to detect cracks and other scatterers. We use the Indirect Boundary Element Method (IBEM) to study the diffraction of P, SV waves with various incidence angles and Rayleigh surface waves. This approximate boundary integral technique is based upon the integral representation for scattered elastic waves using single-layer boundary sources. Our approach is usually called indirect BEM as the sources' strengths should be obtained as an intermediate step. This indirect formulation can give to the analyst a deep physical insight on the generated diffracted waves because it is closer to the physical reality and can be regarded as a realization of Huygens' Principle. In any event, mathematically it is fully equivalent to the classical Somigliana's representation theorem. In order to gauge accuracy we test our method by comparing with previous results in the literature. Various crack configurations, including multiple cracks, are investigated. Results in frequency and time domains are displayed. Under certain conditions the amplitude spectra of those waves clearly show conspicuous resonance peaks.