Vol.12, No.4 EARTHQUAKE ENGINEERING AND ENGINEERING VIBRATION December, 2013
Earthq Eng & Eng Vib (2013) 12: 569-576 DOI: 10.1007/s11803-013-0198-5
Transient analysis of 1D inhomogeneous media by dynamic
inhomogeneous fi nite element method
Yang Zailin
†
, Wang Yao
‡
and Hei Baoping
‡
College of Aerospace and Civil Engineering, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin 150001, China
Abstract: The dynamic inhomogeneous fi nite element method is studied for use in the transient analysis of one-
dimensional inhomogeneous media. The general formula of the inhomogeneous consistent mass matrix is established based
on the shape function. In order to research the advantages of this method, it is compared with the general fi nite element
method. A linear bar element is chosen for the discretization tests of material parameters with two fi ctitious distributions.
And, a numerical example is solved to observe the differences in the results between these two methods. Some characteristics
of the dynamic inhomogeneous fi nite element method that demonstrate its advantages are obtained through comparison with
the general fi nite element method. It is found that the method can be used to solve elastic wave motion problems with a large
element scale and a large number of iteration steps.
Keywords: inhomogeneous media; elastic wave; transient analysis; dynamic inhomogeneous fi nite element method;
discretization
Correspondence to: Yang Zailin, College of Aerospace and
Civil Engineering, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin
150001, China
Tel: +86-13945015652; Fax: +86-451-82519210
E-mail: yangzailin00@163.com
†
Professor;
‡
Lecture
Supported by: the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central
Universities under Grant No. HEUCFZ1125, and the National
Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 10972064
Received September 17, 2012; Accepted April 17, 2013
1 Introduction
Most natural substances, even man-made materials,
are heterogeneous and inhomogeneous. With the
development of science and technology, research about
the behaviors of inhomogeneous media has become
increasingly necessary. The dynamics of inhomogeneous
media is an important research topic in this fi eld.
Currently, the approaches to homogeneous media
are highly developed and widely applied. For example,
the general fi nite element method is based on the
homogeneous media theory, where all of the material
parameters are uniform in the element. In region Ω, all
of the material parameters are assumed to be constant.
EE
=
=
=
⎧
⎨
⎪
⎩
⎪
0
0
0
(1)
where
E
,
and are the material parameters in
region Ω.
E
00 0
,
and
are all constant.
In order to study inhomogeneous media problems,
where the material parameters are related to coordinates,
the region Ω is divided into n pieces of homogeneous
subregions in common.
EE
in
i
i
i
i
ii
i
n
i
=
=≤≤ =
=
⎧
⎨
⎪
⎪
⎩
⎪
⎪
=
∑
,,1
1
(2)
where Ω
i
is the subregion; E
ii i
,
and are the
material parameters of subregion Ω
i
; and E
i
,
i
and
i
are the equivalent constant material parameters in
subregion Ω
i
.
The approaches of homogeneous media can be used
to compute and analyze inhomogeneous models after
the above division and homogenization operations have
been carried out.
As the diffi culty can be greatly decreased by the
processed model, these operations have been widely
applied to inhomogeneous media mechanics, especially
dynamics (Tarau and Otugen, 2002; Pei and Mu,
2003; Luo et al., 2004; Fu et al., 2010). However, in
a continuous transitional inhomogeneous zone, the
processed model is sometimes too different from the
original problem, so that the resulting precision may be
questionable. In order to improve the precision of the
results, inordinate amounts of computing resources are
needed. Even so, the results may still lack precision.