Space discontinuous Galerkin FEM for wave propagation simulation in 3D-printed composite polymers

Additive manufacturing has opened the possibility of creating anatomical twins that mimic the desired properties of the target organ for patient-specific rehearsal and physicians’ advanced training. For some specific applications, it is required for the synthetic organ to replicate the acoustic signature of the actual organ. However, due to the lack of knowledge and control over the characteristics of printed materials, the correlation between the heterogeneous printed microstructure and its ultrasonic signature is not yet fully understood. In this study, the space discontinuous Galerkin FEM is employed to study the wave propagation in printed samples, improve the understanding of their acoustic behaviours, and tackle the challenge of calculation cost by using a parallel solver. First, a unified multidimensional variational framework for the space discontinuous Galerkin method for elastic wave propagation in anisotropic and piecewise homogeneous media is presented. Then, the approach is extended to solve the wave propagation equations in the coupled elastic-acoustic media. Finally, as an example of numerical results, the attenuation coefficient is calculated and compared for different microstructure characteristics using the simulated signal.