TRANSIENT-RESPONSE OF AN ELASTIC HOMOGENEOUS HALF-SPACE TO SUDDENLY APPLIED RECTANGULAR LOADING

A closed-form solution of transient response to suddenly applied loadi ng distributee over a rectangular area on the surface of an elastic ho mogeneous half-space is developed for special purposes such as analysi s of dynamic soil-structure interaction or contact problems. The solut ion is obtained using Laplace transform with respect to time and Fouri er transform with respect to space. Inverse Laplace transform is imple mented analytically. As extreme cases of rectangular loading, the solu tions for a point force or finite line load can also be obtained. The advantages of this solution over most other solutions by numerical ana lyses are that the multiple integrations are reduced by one order, the singularity is removed from the integral kernel, and no additional di scretization in the vicinity of the region of interest is required.