Spectrally formulated wavelet finite element for wave propagation and impact force identification in connected 1-D waveguides

In this paper, a novel wavelet based spectral finite element is developed for studying elastic wave propagation in 1-D connected waveguides. First the partial differential wave equation is converted to simultaneous ordinary differential equations (ODEs) using Daubechies wavelet approximation in time. These ODEs are then solved using finite element (FE) technique by deriving the exact interpolating function in the transformed domain. Spectral element captures the exact mass distribution and thus the system size required is very much smaller then conventional FE. The localized nature of the compactly supported Daubechies wavelet allows easy imposition of initial-boundary values. This circumvents several disadvantages of the conventional spectral element formulation using Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT) particularly in the study of transient dynamics. The proposed method is used to study longitudinal and flexural wave propagation in rods, beams and frame structures. Numerical experiments are performed to show the advantages over FFT-based spectral element methods. The efficiency of the spectral formulation for impact force identification is also demonstrated.