A selective mass scaling method for shear wave propagation analyses in nearly incompressible materials

Summary This paper describes a selective mass scaling method which is designed for the analysis of wave propagation problems in nearly incompressible materials. The incompressibility of materials leads to a high value of the compressional wave speed, which makes the time step extremely small in explicit time integration method. The proposed selective mass scaling method selects the eigenfrequencies related to volumetric deformation modes to decrease them, while it keeps the shear eigenmodes unchanged. This makes the time step no longer limited by the compressional wave speed but by the shear wave speed. A significant reduction of CPU time is obtained with a good accuracy for transient problems in small strains on free or largely prestressed media. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.