Acoustic emission and the plate Green’s function

Abstract

The stress at an arbitrary point in an elastic medium due to an acoustic emission is written in a stress Green’s function formalism. This formalism separates the mathematical description of acoustic radiation into separate factors describing the source and the medium response, which, it is hoped, will facilitate identification of source characteristics from remote observations. The description of the medium response is shown to be equivalent to a well posed elliptic boundary value problem for a 36 component Green’s function. This (frequency analyzed) Green’s function is calculated for the infinite isotropic elastic medium and for a similar plate. The latter example includes a complete description of dispersion, mode conversion, and the normal modes of the slab, although the latter need not be explicitly identified.