Upper bound on wave speeds in anisotropic materials based on elastic projection operators (Q373734)

Summary: An upper bound on the speeds of waves propagating along an arbitrary direction in an elastic material with general anisotropy has been developed from an additive decomposition of the acoustic tensor. Several examples of materials with different elastic symmetries (cubic, tetragonal) are presented. A validation is provided by comparing the upper bounds for copper and tin crystals with numerical solutions of the eigenvalue problems.