Asymptotic analysis of Rayleigh-Lamb dispersion relations under various boundary conditions

Abstract: We investigate the asymptotic behavior of the complex roots of Rayleigh-Lamb dispersion relations arising in elastic waveguides. We consider Neumann, Dirichlet, and fluid boundary conditions and derive explicit asymptotic expansions of the associated wavenumbers as their modulus tends to infinity. In the Neumann case, we provide a rigorous justification of asymptotic formulas that have long been used in the literature without proof, together with higher-order terms and explicit constants. Similar results are obtained for Dirichlet and fluid boundary conditions. The analysis relies on a reformulation of the dispersion relations as zeros of holomorphic functions and on asymptotic properties of the Lambert function. We also show how these asymptotic expansions can be used to establish modal decompositions and well-posedness results for elastic waveguide problems. Numerical experiments confirm the accuracy of the proposed formulas.