Dislocations in a multi-layered elastic solid with applications to fault and interface identifications

Abstract

This paper investigates an elastic dislocation problem within a bounded and multi-layered solid governed by the Lamé system. We address the simultaneous reconstruction of the faults, the jumps in displacement and traction fields across the faults, and the interfaces of layers using a single passive boundary measurement. This inverse problem is particularly challenging due to the discontinuities in both the displacement and traction fields across the faults and the inherent difficulty of establishing uniqueness results with limited measurement data. Under the assumptions that the Lamé parameters are piecewise constants within each layer, satisfying strong convexity conditions, and that the faults exhibit corner singularities, we establish local uniqueness identifiability results for both the interfaces and the faults, as well as the jumps across the faults. Furthermore, we derive global uniqueness results for reconstructing the interfaces, the faults, and the corresponding displacement and traction jumps in generic scenarios under a priori geometric information, where the faults are geometrically general and may be either open or closed.