Dispersion effects of extensional waves in pre-stressed imperfectly bonded incompressible elastic layered composites

The effect of an imperfect interface, on time-harmonic extensional wave propagation in a pre-stressed symmetric layered composite is considered. The bimaterial composite consists of incompressible isotropic elastic materials. The shear spring type resistance model employed to simulate the imperfect interface can accommodate the extreme cases of perfect bonding and a fully slipping interface. The dispersion relation obtained by formulating the incremental boundary-value problem and the use of the propagator matrix technique, is analyzed at the low and high wavenumber limits. For the perfectly bonded and imperfect interface cases in the low wavenumber region, only the fundamental mode has a finite phase speed, while other higher modes have an infinite phase speed when the dimensionless wavenumber approaches zero. However, for the fully slipping interface in the low wavenumber region, both the fundamental mode and the next lowest mode have finite phase speeds. In the high wavenumber region, when the dimensionless wavenumber tends to infinity, the phase speeds of the fundamental mode and the higher modes depend on the phase speeds of the surface and interfacial waves and on the limiting phase speed of the composite. An expression to determine the cut-off frequencies is obtained from the dispersion relation. Numerical examples of dispersion curves are presented, where when the material has to be prescribed either Mooney–Rivlin material or Varga material is assumed. The effect of the imperfect interface is clearly evident in the numerical results.