Copyright © 2011 António Tadeu and Igor Castro. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper simulates wave propagation in an elastic medium containing elastic, fluid, rigid, and empty heterogeneities, which may be thin. It uses a coupling formulation between the boundary element method (BEM)/the traction boundary element method (TBEM) and the method of fundamental solutions (MFS). The full domain is divided into subdomains, which are handled separately by the BEM/TBEM or the MFS, to overcome the specific limitations of each of these methods. The coupling is enforced by applying the prescribed boundary conditions at all medium interfaces. The accuracy, efficiency, and stability of the proposed algorithms are verified by comparing the results with reference solutions. The paper illustrates the computational efficiency of the proposed coupling formulation by computing the CPU time and the error. The transient analysis of wave propagation in the presence of a borehole driven in a cracked medium is used to illustrate the potential of the proposed coupling formulation.