Section: Research Program

Numerical treatment of complex material models

Towards the general aim of being able to consider concrete physical situations, we are interested in taking into account in the numerical methodologies that we study, a better description of the propagation of waves in realistic media. In the case of electromagnetics, a typical physical phenomenon that one has to consider is dispersion. It is present in almost all media and expresses the way the material reacts to an electromagnetic field. In the presence of an electric field a medium does not react instantaneously and thus presents an electric polarization of the molecules or electrons that itself influences the electric displacement. In the case of a linear homogeneous isotropic media, there is a linear relation between the applied electric field and the polarization. However, above some range of frequencies (depending on the considered material), the dispersion phenomenon cannot be neglected and the relation between the polarization and the applied electric field becomes complex. This is rendered via a frequency-dependent complex permittivity. Several models of complex permittivity exist. Concerning biological media, the Debye model is commonly adopted in the presence of water, biological tissues and polymers, so that it already covers a wide range of applications [10]. In the context of nanoplasmonics, one is interested in modeling the dispersion effects on metals on the nanometer scale and at optical frequencies. In this case, the Drude or the Drude-Lorentz models are generally chosen [15]. In the context of seismic wave propagation, we are interested by the intrinsic attenuation of the medium [14]. In realistic configurations, for instance in sedimentary basins where the waves are trapped, we can observe site effects due to local geological and geotechnical conditions which result in a strong increase in amplification and duration of the ground motion at some particular locations. During the wave propagation in such media, a part of the seismic energy is dissipated because of anelastic losses relied to the internal friction of the medium. For these reasons, numerical simulations based on the basic assumption of linear elasticity are no more valid since this assumption results in a severe overestimation of amplitude and duration of the ground motion, even when we are not in presence of a site effect, since intrinsic attenuation is not taken into account.