Elastic immersive wave experimentation

Abstract

We describe an elastic wave propagation laboratory that enables a solid object to be artificially immersed within an extended (numerical) environment such that a physical wave propagation experiment carried out in the solid drives the propagation in the extended (numerical) environment and vice-versa. The underlying method of elastic immersive wave experimentation for such a laboratory involves deploying arrays of active multi-component sources at the traction-free surface of the solid (e.g., a cube of granitic rock). These sources are used to accomplish two tasks: (1) cancel outgoing waves, and (2) emit ingoing waves representing the first-order interactions between the physical and extended domains, computed using, e.g., a finite-difference (FD) method. Higher-order interactions can be built by alternately carrying out the processes for canceling the outgoing waves and the FD simulations for generating the ingoing waves. We validate the proposed iterative scheme for realizing elastic immersive wave experimentation using two-dimensional (2D) synthetic wave experiments.