Copyright © 2010 F. Schöpfer et al. 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

Dispersion curves of elastic guided waves in plates can be efficiently computed by the Strip-Element Method. This method is based on a finite-element discretization in the thickness direction of the plate and leads to an eigenvalue problem relating frequencies to wavenumbers of the wave modes. In this paper we present a rigorous mathematical background of the Strip-Element Method for anisotropic media including a thorough analysis of the corresponding infinite-dimensional eigenvalue problem as well as a proof of the existence of eigenvalues.