Seminar: Thoughts on shear waves and shear waves on thoughts

Author: Professor Paul Barbone, Mechanical Engineering, Boston University.
Summary: Isotropic solid materials can support the propagation of both dilatational waves and distortional waves, the latter better known as shear waves. Propagation of shear waves in soft tissues is a subject of considerable current interest in the biomechanics and biomedical imaging communities. For that purpose, we present an axisymmetric model of elastic shear wave propagation to measure dispersive wave speed and attenuation in homogeneous elastic media. Biomedical imaging applications, however, present much more fun and exotic situations to study shear waves, including in the presence of strong magnetic fields, superposed large poroelastic deformations, strong material property gradients, and medium activation. We use mathematical models to study elastic shear wave propagation in these scenarios.