Guided wave propagation in uncertain elastic media

In this paper, the authors present a numerical approach to study the guided elastic wave propagation in uncertain elastic media. Stochastic wave finite element method (S.W.F.E.M) formulation with consideration of spatial variability of material and geometrical properties is developed for probabilistic analysis of structures. The uncertain material properties are modelled as a set of random fields. The idea is to consider the random fields as a supplementary dimension of the problem through the spatial discretisation using the finite elements process. The stochastic forced response is formulated to study the stochastic dynamical behavior of the structure using the appropriate boundary conditions. In this work, a SWFE approach is employed in order to analyse the stochastic wave propagation and the numerical accuracy. The computational efficiency of the method is demonstrated by comparison with Monte Carlo simulations.