The complex Rayleigh waves play an important role in the energy conversion efficiency of magneto-electro-elastic devices, so it is necessary to explore the wave propagation characteristics for the better applications in engineering. This paper modifies the Laguerre orthogonal polynomial to investigate the complex Rayleigh waves propagating in nonhomogeneous magneto-electro-elastic half-spaces. The improved method simplifies the calculation process by incorporating boundary conditions into the constitutive relations, shortens the solving time by transforming the solution of wave equation to an eigenvalue problem, and obtains all wave modes, including real and imaginary and complex wavenumbers. The three-dimensional curves of full frequency spectrum and phase velocities are presented for the better description of the conversion from complex Rayleigh wave modes to real wave ones; besides, the displacement distributions, electric and magnetic potential curves are obtained in thickness and propagation directions, respectively. Numerical results are analyzed and discussed elaborately in three cases: variation of nonhomogeneous coefficients, absence of magnetism, and absence of electricity. The results can be used to optimize and fabricate the acoustic surface wave devices of the nonhomogeneous magneto-electro-elastic materials.
Keywords: complex rayleigh waves; half-space; laguerre orthogonal polynomial; magneto-electro-elastic; nonhomogeneous.