The degeneration of image singularities from anisotropic materials to isotropic materials for an elastic half-plane

The degeneration of image singularities from an anisotropic material to an isotropic material for a half-plane is discussed in this study. The Green’s functions for anisotropic and isotropic half-planes with traction free boundary subjected to concentrated forces and dislocations have been obtained by many authors. It was commonly accepted that the solution of isotropic problem cannot be derived from anisotropic solutions. However, we believe that this possibility exists as we will demonstrate in this paper. Anisotropic materials include only image singularities of order O(1/r) (i.e., forces and dislocations) existing on image points. There are many image points for anisotropic materials and the locations of these image points depend on the material constants. However, isotropic materials have only one image point with higher order image singularities (O(1/r²), O(1/r³)). From the analysis provided in this study, it is found that the higher order image singularities for an isotropic half-plane are generated by combining the concentrated forces and dislocations when an anisotropic material degenerates to an isotropic material. The solutions of higher order image singularities for isotropic material are dependent. Therefore, these image singularities can be combined to form only three or four simpler image singularities acting on an image point of the isotropic material.