3D elastic wave propagation modelling in the presence of 2D fluid-filled thin inclusions

In this paper, the traction boundary element method (TBEM) and the boundary element method (BEM), formulated in the frequency domain, are combined so as to evaluate the 3D scattered wave field generated by 2D fluid-filled thin inclusions. This model overcomes the thin-body difficulty posed when the classical BEM is applied. The inclusion may exhibit arbitrary geometry and orientation, and may have null thickness. The singular and hypersingular integrals that appear during the model's implementation are computed analytically, which overcomes one of the drawbacks of this formulation. Different source types such as plane, cylindrical and spherical sources, may excite the medium. The results provided by the proposed model are verified against responses provided by analytical models derived for a cylindrical circular fluid-filled borehole.The performance of the proposed model is illustrated by solving the cases of a flat fluid-filled fracture with small thickness and a fluid-filled S-shaped inclusion, modelled with both small and null thickness, all of which are buried in an unbounded elastic medium. Time and frequency responses are presented when spherical pulses with a Ricker wavelet time evolution strikes the cracked medium. To avoid the aliasing phenomena in the time domain, complex frequencies are used. The effect of these complex frequencies is removed by rescaling the time responses obtained by first applying an inverse Fourier transformation to the frequency domain computations. The numerical results are analysed and a selection of snapshots from different computer animations is given. This makes it possible to understand the time evolution of the wave propagation around and through the fluid-filled inclusion.