the present article is to prove well-posedness of the system of PDE’s, that models 2D or 3D planar
elastic waveguides with internal and boundary source terms. To this end, we adapt the strategy
developed for acoustic waveguides in [11], which differs from [5]. Under stronger assumptions on
the regularity of the source terms than those in [5], we present in Theorem 2 a constructive proof
of existence and regularity of a wavefield propagating in a two dimensional elastic waveguide.
As it turns out, this result is not valid at some particular frequencies, which we call critical
frequencies, and that are characterized in the proof of Theorem 2. In particular, we establish in
Corollary 1 that the critical frequencies, for which the Lamb family is no longer complete, coincide
with the vanishing of the bi-orthogonality relation established by [14]. This result, up to our
knowledge, has not been proven before and may help understanding the mathematical analysis of
elastic waveguides.
Concerning the study of wave propagation in three-dimensional plates, most of the work that we
are aware of consists in adapting the 2D framework to situations with radial or axial symmetry (see
for instance [19, 28, 2, 33]). In [31], arbitrary source terms are considered, without mathematical
justification however. Introducing the Helmholtz-Hodge decomposition of the wavefield [9], we split
the three dimensional system of elasticity into a system of two independent equations. One of them
fits into the scalar wave framework developed in [11], while the other can be rewritten using the
X/Yformulation. This provides a full expression for the decomposition of the wavefield generated
by arbitrary source terms in dimension 3, see Theorem 3.
Equipped with these results, we can generalize the shape reconstruction method presented in
[11] to the case of elastic plates, so as to determine possible defects (bumps or dips) in the geometry
of a plate, from multi-frequency measurements. We use the very same procedure as in the acoustic
case : after mapping the perturbed plate to a straight configuration, we simplify the resulting
system of equations using the Born approximation. The scattered wavefield generated by a known
incident wavefield in the original geometry, gives rise in the straightened plate to a boundary source
term, that depends on the shape defect. Using measurements of the scattered field on the surface
of the plate at different frequencies, we can reconstruct in a stable way the shape defect (provided
the latter is small enough). Numerical reconstructions are presented in the last part of the article,
which show the efficiency of the method.
The paper is organized as follows. In section 2, we study the forward source problem in a two
dimensional waveguide and introduce all the tools needed to use Lamb waves as a modal basis. In
section 3, we generalize the results of section 2 to the forward source problem in three dimensional
plates. Section 4 is devoted to the reconstruction of shape defects in two dimensional plates,
generalizing the method presented in [11]. Finally, in section 5 we show numerical illustrations of
the propagation of waves in two and three dimensional plates as well as reconstructions of different
shape defects.
2 Forward source problem in a regular 2D waveguide
In this section, we present a complete study of the forward elastic source problem in a two-
dimensional regular waveguide. We use the X/Yformulation developed in [25, 26] which allows a
modal decomposition of any elastic wavefield using Lamb modes. Most of the results presented here
are already known, and can be found in [26, 28, 1]. Our main contribution is to provide a rigorous
proof of well-posedness for the direct problem and of the fact that its solutions can be represented
in terms of Lamb modes (Theorem 2). We also follow the suggestions in [18] to define the set of
2