Disturbance produced in an elastic half-space by impulsive normal pressure

1. Introduction. The disturbance produced in an elastic half-space by different types of buried sources have been studied by various authors. However, the only exact solutions of problems for the half-space in which the disturbance is produced by impulsive surface tractions are due to Pekeris (9) and Chao (4), though for the half-plane such problems have been studied by de Hoop (5), Ang (1) and Mitra (8). Pekeris (9) evaluated the surface displacement produced by a normal point load on the surface using a method of inversion of the operational solution developed earlier (Bateman & Pekeris (2)). A finite pressure-area, however, represents physical situations better than a point load. In this paper, the displacement produced in the half-space by uniform impulsive pressure acting over a circular portion of the surface has been obtained in terms of definite integrals. On the surface, the displacement has been split up into a number of terms some of which represent the P-wave contribution, while others give the Rayleigh-wave contribution to the displacement. The method of solution involves the use of integral transforms and Cagniard's (3) method; Pekeris's method is not applicable in this case since the appropriate transformation of an integral along the real axis to one along the imaginary axis cannot be carried out.