The Earthquake Engineering Online Archive

Perfectly matched layers for transient elastodynamics of unbounded domains

Basu, Ushnish; Chopra, Anil K.

UCB/SEMM-2002/13, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, 2002, 42 pages (500/C23/2002/13)

A perfectly matched layer (PML) is an unphysical, absorbing layer model for linear wave equations that absorbs, almost perfectly, outgoing waves of all non-tangential angles-of-incidence and of all non-zero frequencies. This paper presents corresponding time-domain, displacement-based governing equations of these PMLs and displacement-based finite-element implementations of these equation, suitable for direct transient analysis. Numerical results are presented for the anti-plane motion of a semi-infinite layer on a rigid base, and for classical soil-structure interaction problems.

Available online: http://nisee.berkeley.edu/documents/SEMM/SEMM-2002-13.pdf (2 MB)