The three-dimensional steady-state thermo-elastodynamic problem of moving sources over a half space

A procedure based on the Radon transform and elements of distribution theory is developed to obtain fundamental thermoelastic three-dimensional (3D) solutions for thermal and/or mechanical point sources moving steadily over the surface of a half space. A concentrated heat flux is taken as the thermal source, whereas the mechanical source consists of normal and tangential concentrated loads. It is assumed that the sources move with a constant velocity along a fixed direction. The solutions obtained are exact within the bounds of Biot’s coupled thermo-elastodynamic theory, and results for surface displacements are obtained over the entire speed range (i.e. for sub-Rayleigh, super-Rayleigh/subsonic, transonic and supersonic source speeds). This problem has relevance to situations in Contact Mechanics, Tribology and Dynamic Fracture, and is especially related to the well-known heat checking problem (thermo-mechanical cracking in an unflawed half-space material from high-speed asperity excitations). Our solution technique fully exploits as auxiliary solutions the ones for the corresponding plane-strain and anti-plane shear problems by reducing the original 3D problem to two separate 2D problems. These problems are uncoupled from each other, with the first problem being thermoelastic and the second one pure elastic. In particular, the auxiliary plane-strain problem is completely analogous to the original problem, not only with regard to the field equations but also with regard to the boundary conditions. This makes the technique employed here more advantageous than other techniques, which require the prior determination of a fictitious auxiliary plane-strain problem through solving an integral equation.