Transient Waves on the Free Surface of a Viscoelastic Anisotropic Half-Space

The Stroh formalism is employed to discuss the existence of transient surface waves on a viscoelastic anisotropic hall-space. The compatibility conditions, obtained using the integral formulation of Lothe and Barnett [13, 14], are examined on the basis of an asymptotic expansion of the viscoelastic kernel and a separation of space variables. Some previous results on elastic media are extended to viscoelasticity, exploiting the consequences of the second law of thermodynamics. It is found that all the allowed transient surface modes take the form of inhomogeneous plane waves whose amplitude exponentially decays along the propagation direction on the surface. Special solutions are derived explicitly for one-component surface waves where transient modes are admitted also in those cases in which stationary waves cannot occur.Mathematics Subject Classifications (2000) 74D05, 74J15.