Time-harmonic waves in viscoelastic media (Q1116727)

Among the models of dissipative solids, viscoelasticity is perhaps the most widely applied. In practice one way of determining the constitutive parameters of the model is through the analysis of wave propagation. In this context time-harmonic waves allow the derivation of simple analytical expressions which can be easily correlated with experiment. Mathematically the importance of investigating time-harmonic waves is due to the linearity of the viscoelastic model. Through superposition and Fourier analysis we can determine the behaviour of the material once we know the response to single frequency waves. This view is at the basis of a wide literature on time-harmonic waves in (linear) dissipative bodies. Notwithstanding this, there are some points which deserve further attention. Firstly, dissipative models are considered to get a realistic description of wave attenuation, and dissipativity should find an appropriate characterization from thermodynamics. Now, in the case of discontinuity waves the wave amplitude decays because of the negative definiteness of the attenuation tensor and this property has been shown to hold as a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics. One expects that similar features occur also in the case of time-harmonic waves. Secondly, the dissipativity of the solid requires that the single frequency wave be described by complex vectors and this makes the wave modes quite a hard subject. In this note we investigate both aspects by analysing the wave modes. In order to avoid unnecessary complicated calculations we restrict our attention to the one dimensional case. It is shown that definite results for the phase velocity and the attenuation of plane waves follow by taking into account the constitutive (thermodynamic) restrictions and the behaviour of the complex wave number under inversion of the frequency.