A knife-edge load traveling on the surface of an elastic halfspace

A load moving on the surface of an elastic halfspace forms a basic problem that is related to different fields of engineering, such as the subsoil response due to vehicle motion or the ultrasound field due to an angle beam transducer. Many numerical techniques have been developed to solve this problem, but these do not provide the fundamental physical insights that are offered by closed form solutions, which are very rare in comparison. This paper describes the development and analysis of the closed form space-time domain solution for a knife-edge load, i.e. a line segment of normal traction, moving at a constant speed on the surface of an elastic halfspace. The various contributions making up the exact solution, obtained with the Cagniard-De Hoop method, produce all the complicated wave patterns from this distributed type of loading. Examples are the transient wave field at the starting position of the load, angled conical and plane waves propagating into the solid, Rayleigh waves propagating along the surface, and head waves spreading and attenuating in specific directions from the loading path. The influence of the load speed on the wave field is investigated by considering the singularities in the relevant complex domains, for each sonic range relative to the bulk wave velocities. The characteristic wave fronts and wave patterns as exhibited by the particle displacements are evaluated for subsonic, transonic and supersonic load speeds.