Propagation of SH‐wave in an initially stressed orthotropic medium sandwiched by a homogeneous and an inhomogeneous semi‐infinite media

The paper presents a study of propagation of shear wave (SH‐wave) in an orthotropic elastic medium under initial stress sandwiched by a homogeneous semi‐infinite medium and an inhomogeneous half‐space. The technique of separation of variables has been adopted to get the analytical solutions for the dispersion relation in a closed form. The propagation of SH‐waves is influenced by inhomogeneity parameters and initial stress parameter. Velocities of SH‐waves are calculated numerically for different cases. As a special case when the intermediate layer and half‐space are homogeneous, computed frequency equation coincides with general equation of Love wave. To study the effect of inhomogeneity parameters and initial stress parameter, we have plotted the velocity of SH‐wave in several figures and observed that the velocity of wave decreases with the increases of non‐dimensional wave number. It can be found that the phase velocity decreases with the increase of inhomogeneity parameters. We observed that the velocity of SH‐wave decreases with the increases of initial stress parameter in both homogeneous and inhomogeneous media. GUI has been developed by using MATLAB to generalize the effect of the parameters discussed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.