Elastic waves in nonhomogeneous media under 2D conditions: I. Fundamental solutions

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to present three methods of analysis for elastic waves propagating in two dimensional, elastic nonhomogeneous media. The first step, common to all methods, is a transformation of the governing equations of motion so that derivatives with respect to the material parameters no longer appear in the differential operator. This procedure, however, restricts analysis to a very specific class of nonhomogeneous media, namely those for which Poisson's ratio is equal to 0.25 and the elastic parameters are quadratic functions of position. Subsequently, fundamental solutions are evaluated by: (i) conformal mapping in conjunction with wave decomposition, which in principle allows for both vertical and lateral heterogeneities; (ii) wave decomposition into pseudo-dilatational and pseudo-rotational components, which results in an Euler-type equation for the transformed solution if medium heterogeneity is a function of one coordinate only; and (iii) Fourier transformation followed by a first order differential equation system solution, where the final step involving inverse transformation from the wavenumber domain is accomplished numerically. Finally, in the companion paper numerical examples serve to illustrate the above methodologies and to delineate their range of applicability.