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Modelling visco-elastic seismic wave propagation : a fast-multipole boundary element method and its coupling with finite elements

The numerical simulation of elastic wave propagation in unbounded media is a topical issue. This need arises in a variety of real life engineering problems, from the modelling of railway- or machinery-induced vibrations to the analysis of seismic wave propagation and soil-structure interaction problems. Due to the complexity of the involved geometries and materials behavior, modelling such situations requires sophisticated numerical methods. The Boundary Element method (BEM) is a very effective approach for dynamical problems in spatially-extended regions (idealized as unbounded), especially since the advent of fast BEMs such as the Fast Multipole Method (FMM) used in this work. The BEM is based on a boundary integral formulation which requires the discretization of the only domain boundary (i.e. a surface in 3-D) and accounts implicitly for the radiation conditions at infinity. As a main disadvantage, the BEM leads a priori to a fully-populated and (using the collocation approach) non-symmetrical coefficient matrix, which make the traditional implementation of this method prohibitive for large problems (say O(106) boundary DoFs). Applied to the BEM, the Multi-Level Fast Multipole Method (ML-FMM) strongly lowers the complexity in computational work and memory that hinder the classical formulation, making the ML-FMBEM very competitive in modelling elastic wave propagation. The elastodynamic version of the Fast Multipole BEM (FMBEM), in a form enabling piecewise-homogeneous media, has for instance been successfully used to solve seismic wave propagation problems in a previous work (thesis dissertation of S. Chaillat, ENPC, 2008). This thesis aims at extending the capabilities of the existing frequency-domain elastodynamic FMBEM in two directions. Firstly, the time-harmonic elastodynamic ML-FMBEM formulation has been extended to the case of weakly dissipative viscoelastic media. Secondly, the FMBEM and the Finite Element Method (FEM) have been coupled to take advantage of the versatility of the FEM to model complex geometries and non-linearities while the FM-BEM accounts for wave propagation in the surrounding unbounded medium. In this thesis, we consider two strategies for coupling the FMBEM and the FEM to solve three-dimensional time-harmonic wave propagation problems in unbounded domains. The main idea is to separate one or more bounded subdomains (modelled by the FEM) from the complementary semi-infinite viscoelastic propagation medium (modelled by the FMBEM) through a non-overlapping domain decomposition. Two coupling strategies have been implemented and their performances assessed and compared on several examples

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:CCSD/oai:tel.archives-ouvertes.fr:tel-00730752
Date13 June 2012
CreatorsGrasso, Eva
PublisherUniversité Paris-Est
Source SetsCCSD theses-EN-ligne, France
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypePhD thesis

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