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An incoming elastodynamic wave impinges on an elastic obstacle is embedded in an infinite elastic medium. The objective of the paper is to examine the subsequent elastic fields scattered by and transmitted into the elastic obstacle. By applying a boundary-field equation method, we are able to formulate a nonlocal boundary problem (NBP) in the Laplace transformed domain, using the field equations inside the obstacle and boundary integral equations in the exterior elastic medium. Existence, uniqueness and stability of the solutions to the NBP are established in Sobolev spaces for two different integral representations. The corresponding results in the time domain are obtained. The stability bounds are translated into time domain estimates that can serve as the starting point for a numerical discretization based on Convolution Quadrature.

The problem of determining the manner in which an incoming acoustic wave is scattered by an elastic body immersed in a fluid is one of central importance in detecting and identifying submerged objects. The problem is generally referred to as a fluid-structure interaction and is mathematically formulated as a time-dependent transmission problem. In this paper, we consider a typical fluid-structure interaction problem by using a coupling procedure which reduces the problem to a nonlocal initial-boundary problem in the elastic body with a system of integral equations on the interface between the domains occupied by the elastic body and the fluid. We analyze this nonlocal problem by the Lubich approach via the Laplace transform, an essential feature of which is that it works directly on data in the time domain rather than in the transformed domain. Our results may serve as a mathematical foundation for treating time-dependent fluid-structure interaction problems by convolution quadrature coupling of FEM and BEM.

In this paper we consider the three dimensional exterior Stokes problem and study the solvability of the corresponding continuous and discrete formulations that arise from the coupling of a dual-mixed variational formulation with the boundary integral equation method. More precisely, after employing the incompressibility condition to eliminate the pressure, we consider the resulting velocity-stress-vorticity approach with different kind of boundary conditions on an annular bounded domain, and couple the underlying equations with either one or two boundary integral equations arising from the application of the usual and normal traces to the Green representation formula in the exterior unbounded region. As a result, we obtain saddle point operator equations, which are then analyzed by the well-known Babuska-Brezzi theory. We prove the well-posedness of the continuous formulations, identifying previously the space of solutions of the associated homogeneous problem, and specify explicit hypotheses to be satisfied by the finite element and boundary element subspaces in order to guarantee the stability of the respective Galerkin schemes. In particular, following a similar analysis given recently for the Laplacian, we are able to extend the classical Johnson & N��d��lec procedure to the present case, without assuming any restrictive smoothness requirement on the coupling boundary, but only Lipschitz-continuity. In addition, and differently from known approaches for the elasticity problem, we are also able to extend the Costabel & Han coupling procedure to the 3D Stokes problem by providing a direct proof of the required coerciveness property, that is without argueing by contradiction, and by using the natural norm of each space instead of mesh-dependent norms. Finally, we briefly describe concrete examples of discrete spaces satisfying the aforementioned hypotheses.

We consider the inverse problem for an elastic body emerged in a fluid due to an acoustic wave. The shape of this obstacle is to be reconstructed from the far-field pattern of the scattered wave. For the numerical solution in the two-dimensional case, we compare a simple Newton type iteration method with the Kirsch-Kress algorithm. Our computational tests reveal that the Kirsch-Kress method converges faster for obstacles with very smooth boundaries. The simple Newton method, however, is more stable in the case of not so smooth domains and more robust with respect to measurement errors.

We consider the interaction between an elastic body and a compressible inviscid fluid, which occupies the unbounded exterior domain. The inverse problem of determining the shape of such an elastic scatterer from the measured far field pattern of the scattered fluid pressure field is of central importance in detecting and identifying submerged objects. Following a method proposed by Kirsch and Kress, we approximate the acoustic and elastodynamic wave by potentials over auxiliary surfaces, and we reformulate the inverse problem as an optimisation problem. The objective function to be minimised is the sum of three terms. The first is the deviation of the approximate far field pattern from the measured one, the second is a regularisation term, and the last a control term for the transmission condition. We prove that the optimisation problem has a solution and that, for the regularisation parameter tending to zero, the minimisers tend to a solution of the inverse problem. In contrast to a numerical method from a previous paper, the presented method does require neither a direct solution method nor an additional treatment of possible Jones modes.