Numerical simulation of 3D SH-wave fields generated in anisotropic materials

Under certain conditions, horizontally polarized shear (SH) waves can be generated by using Electromagnetic Acoustic Transducers. To explain the experimentally observed phenomena and to predict the cases where SH-waves might be best employed, simulation of inherent wave propagation effects such as beam skewing, splitting and distortion is required. In this paper, a previously developed methodology to map radiation fields for longitudinal piezoelectric transducers is applied to the imaging of three-dimensional SH-fields generated in anisotropic propagation media. The processed data files are calculated for transversely isotropic (TI) materials via the Generalized Point-Source-Synthesis method. The synthetic data is transferred to an imaging workstation, where the 3D-transducer fields are displayed using commercially available graphic packages