Propagation of compressional elastic waves through a 1-D medium with contact nonlinearities

Propagation of monochromatic elastic waves across cracks is investigated in 1D, both theoretically and numerically. Cracks are modeled by nonlinear jump conditions. The mean dilatation of a single crack and the generation of harmonics are estimated by a perturbation analysis, and computed by the harmonic balance method. With a periodic and finite network of cracks, direct numerical simulations are performed and compared with Bloch-Floquet's analysis.