Thermally Induced Stress Waves in a Laminated Composite

Abstract

A solution is presented for the response of a periodically laminated elastic half plane subjected to rapid internal heating. The assumed temperature distribution has been used in previous investigations of electromagnetic absorption problems where thermal diffusion may be neglected. The laminations are perpendicular to the free surface of the half plane, and the incident flux is absorbed in each layer according to an exponential decay with depth. Since heal conduction is neglected on this time scale, the temperature distribution is discontinuous at the lamination interfaces. A microstructured continuum theory provides the dispersive model, and a solution is obtained for the composite stress in the far field. Limiting forms of the solution are included for the cases when the radiation is absorbed in the alternate layers only or when dispersion can be neglected. Several numerical examples are presented to illustrate the effect of dispersion.