General reconstruction of elastic strain fields from their Longitudinal Ray Transform

Abstract: We develop an algorithm for reconstruction of elastic strain fields from their Longitudinal Ray Transform (LRT) in either two or three dimensions. In general, the LRT only determines the solenoidal part of a symmetric tensor field, but elastic strain fields additionally satisfy mechanical equilibrium, an extra condition that allows for full reconstruction in many cases. Our method provides full reconstruction for general elastic strain fields in connected objects whose boundary only contains one component, while previous results included other requirements such as no residual stress, or zero boundary traction. This allows for full reconstruction in energy resolved neutron transmission imaging for simple objects. Along the way, we prove that the LRT of a potential rank-2 tensor restricted to a bounded set determines the potential on the boundary of the set up to infinitesimal rigid motions on each component of the boundary. The method is demonstrated with numerical examples in two dimensions.