Reflection of plane waves from the boundary of an initially stressed incompressible half-space

Abstract

In this paper, nonlinear theory of elasticity is used to study the effect of initial stress on plane waves in an incompressible material. For this problem, the initial stress is not associated with a finite elastic deformation and the material is assumed to be isotropic in the absence of the initial stress. The theory of superposition of infinitesimal deformations on finite deformation is applied to a problem of plane incremental motions in an initially stressed incompressible homogeneous elastic half-space. The general formulation of the problem is presented first and then specialized using a prototype strain energy function. Homogeneous plane waves are considered and the analysis is carried out for incompressible materials in both the deformed and the undeformed reference configurations. In addition to this, problems for the reflection of small amplitude homogeneous waves from the plane boundary of an initially stressed half-space are also considered and graphical results are included, which show the effect of initial stress on reflection. It is noted that the reflection coefficients in this case behave in a similar fashion when the initial stress is a pre-stress.