Transient Green's functions of a buried pulse in a constrained transversely isotropic half-space

Abstract

In this paper, transient surface Green's functions (GFs) excited by a general dynamic pulse buried in a constrained transversely isotropic (TI) half-space are derived in analytical forms. The constrained transverse isotropy is defined by an explicit relation that expresses one of the five elastic constants in terms of the other four independent constants so that no coupled P-SV wave exists. Use is made of the solutions available for general TI materials in Hankel–Laplace transformed domain in order to extract the corresponding response functions for the constrained material. Under this constraint, the coupled fourth-order wave operator, which represents the convolved motion of the quasi-longitudinal and quasi-transverse waves, is decoupled into two separated second-order wave operators describing the motion of the pure dilatational (P) and pure shear (SV) waves. The involved Laplace transform inversion is carried out using the novel Cagniard scheme so that the final displacement GFs are expressed in terms of the elementary line integrals over a finite interval. The GF solution is valid for the entire range of the constrained TI material including material isotropy as its special case, and clearly illustrates the disturbances due to different stress waves including, P, SV, SH, Rayleigh and diffracted SP waves. Moreover, the GFs show that in this constrained TI material, the compressional and horizontally polarized waves, excited by a source located at an arbitrary depth, propagate towards the surface with direction-dependent velocities. The explicit formulas for these velocities of the waves are obtained in terms of the inclination angle of the wave normal with respect to the axis of material symmetry. On the other hand, the vertically polarized wave and the diffracted SP wave propagate with eigen velocity, independent from the direction of the propagation. Two critical epicentral distances, at which mode conversion in ray diagram occurs, are detected for this constrained TI material. One critical distance marks the phenomena of total reflection of SV-waves where the incident SV-wave is totally reflected and the diffracted SP-wave travels along the free surface. The other marks the distance where the SH- and SP-waves become coalescent, and furthermore, before this epicentral distance the SH-wave is faster, and after this distance, the SP-wave is faster. To show the relevance of this constrained TI material in engineering and material modeling applications and its relation to the physics of TI materials, we also demonstrate that, in addition to its mathematical simplification, this reduced anisotropy can well approximate the elastic coefficients of some real TI materials, particularly those encountered in exploration geophysics and seismology.