Thermally Induced Stress Waves in an Elastic Layer

Abstract

A solution is presented for the stress-wave response of a partially transparent infinite elastic layer subjected to electromagnetic radiation. The radiation is assumed to be deposited with a radial Gaussian distribution in a time short compared with thermal diffusion times. The development is based on the equations of uncoupled dynamic thermoelasticity with heat conduction neglected. Laplace and Hankel transform techniques provide the formal solution and numerical integration of the resulting expressions yields the time-dependent stress distributions in the layer. Several examples are included that illustrate the significance of the dynamic effects and their dependence on the radial coordinate and heating time.