A diffraction problem for the biharmonic wave equation in one-dimensional periodic structures

This work concerns the propagation of flexural waves through one-dimensional periodic structures embedded in thin elastic plates. We show that the out-of-plane displacement of the plate only contains the Helmholtz wave component and the modified Helmholtz wave component is not supported when the Navier boundary condition is imposed. An adaptive finite element method with transparent boundary condition is developed for solving the associated boundary value problem. Numerical results show that the method is effective to solve the diffraction grating problem of the biharmonic wave equation.