Transient Response of an Elastic Homogeneous Half-Space to Suddenly Applied Rectangular Loading

Abstract

A closed-form solution of transient response to suddenly applied loading distributed over a rectangular area on the surface of an elastic homogeneous half-space is developed for special purposes such as analysis of dynamic soil-structure interaction or contact problems. The solution is obtained using Laplace transform with respect to time and Fourier transform with respect to space. Inverse Laplace transform is implemented analytically. As extreme cases of rectangular loading, the solutions for a point force or finite line load can also be obtained. The advantages of this solution over most other solutions by numerical analyses are that the multiple integrations are reduced by one order, the singularity is removed from the integral kernel, and no additional discretization in the vicinity of the region of interest is required.