Stability, instability and interaction of solitary pulses in a composite medium

Abstract

Abstract The questions of a dynamical stability and instability of soliton-like solutions (solitary pulses) of the Hamiltonian equations, describing planar waves in nonlinear elastic composites are considered, both in the presence as well as in the absence of the anisotropy. In the anisotropic case one has the slow and the fast two-parametric soliton families on the background of the quiescent state. In the absence of the anisotropy these two families coalesce into the unique three parametric family. It was shown recently that solitary pulses of the slow family in the anisotropic composite and pulses in the isotropic composite are stable when their speeds lie inside a certain range, the so-called range of stability. In the present paper, on the basis of numerical solving of the Cauchy problem for the basic governing equations, the classification is given of the types of instability of solitary pulses from the fast family for all range of speeds as well as in the case of the slow family and in the isotropic case, when the speeds of the pulses lie without the range of stability. The first type of instability is the blow-up instability for the slow anisotropic and isotropic pulses, living without the range of stability and also for high amplitude fast anisotropic pulses. The second type of instability is the instability resulting in energy exchange between the components of strain tensor for low amplitude fast anisotropic solitary pulses. The reasons of the both types of instability are discussed in detail. The interaction between the pairs of solitary pulses of different nature is investigated both analytically as well as numerically. It is found out that solitary pulses having the different polarization, i.e. different sign of amplitudes, can form bound states, oscillating about the common center, subjected to a motion with a constant speed, approximately equal to the average of speeds of two pulses when they are far apart.