International Journal of Mathematics and Mathematical Sciences
Volume 19 (1996), Issue 1, Pages 131-143
doi:10.1155/S0161171296000208

Magneto-thermoelastic waves induced by a thermal shock in a finitely conducting elastic half space

S. K. Roychoudhuri and Santwana Banerjee (Mukhopadhyay)

Department of Mathematics, Burdwan University, West Bengal, India

Received 2 April 1992; Revised 22 September 1993

Copyright © 1996 S. K. Roychoudhuri and Santwana Banerjee (Mukhopadhyay). This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The propagation of magneto-thermoelastic disturbances produced by a thermal shock in a finitely conducting elastic half-space in contact with vacuum is investigated. The boundary of the half-space is subjected to a normal load. Lord-Shulman theory of thermoelasticity [1] is used to account for the interaction between the elastic and thermal fields. Laplace transform on time is used to obtain the short-time approximations of the solutions because of the short duration of 'second sound' effects. It is found that in the half-space the displacement is continuous at the modified dilational and thermal wavefronts, whereas the perturbed magnetic field, stress and the temperature suffer discontinuities at these locations. The perturbed magnetic field, is, however, discontinuous at the Alf'ven-acoustic wavefront in vacuum.