Numerical simulation of effective phase velocity and attenuation of shear elastic wave propagation in unidirectional composite materials

•A numerical model has been proposed to model coherent waves in composite materials.•Attenuation and phase velocity of four composite materials have been calculated.•Three representative theoretical models have been validated.

In this paper, a simple simulation approach is presented for calculating the effective phase velocity and attenuation coefficient of elastic shear waves propagating in composite materials with randomly distributed unidirectional inclusions. As an application of the developed numerical approach, the phase velocities and attenuation coefficients of the coherent waves in four different types of composite material are simulated for various incident frequencies up to π. Numerical results are compared with theoretical predictions obtained from three representative theoretical models. While all theoretical results agree very well with numerical values at low incident frequencies, the discrepancies increase with the increased incident frequency and volume fraction of inclusions. It has been found that within the frequency and volume fraction ranges considered in this work, the generalized self-consistent model by Kanaun and Levin [18] seems to provide the most accurate estimations.