A quadrature-free Legendre polynomial approach for the fast modelling guided circumferential wave in anisotropic fractional order viscoelastic hollow cylinders

Compared to the traditional integer order viscoelastic model, a fractional order derivative viscoelastic model is shown to be advantageous. The characteristics of guided circumferential waves in an anisotropic fractional order Kelvin–Voigt viscoelastic hollow cylinder are investigated by a quadrature-free Legendre polynomial approach combining the Weyl definition of fractional order derivatives. The presented approach can obtain dispersion solutions in a stable manner from an eigenvalue/eigenvector problem for the calculation of wavenumbers and displacement profiles of viscoelastic guided wave, which avoids a lot of numerical integration calculation in a traditional polynomial method and greatly improves the computational efficiency. Comparisons with the related studies are conducted to validate the correctness of the presented approach. The full three dimensional spectrum of an anisotropic fractional Kelvin–Voigt hollow cylinder is plotted. The influence of fractional order and material parameters on the phase velocity dispersion and attenuation curves of guided circumferential wave is discussed in detail. Moreover, the difference of the phase velocity dispersion and attenuation characteristics between the Kelvin–Voigt and hysteretic viscoelastic models is also illustrated. The presented approach along with the observed wave features should be particularly useful in non-destructive evaluations using waves in viscoelastic waveguides.