Boundary-initiated wave phenomena in thermoelastic materials
The linear theory of Gurtin and Pipkin, and Chen and Gurtin is adopted to study one-dimensional progressive waves generated by thermal and mechanical disturbances applied at the boundary of a circular hole in an unbounded homogeneous thermoelastic medium. A ray-series approach is employed to generate asymptotic wavefront expansions for the field variables. The characteristics of the propagation process are obtained simply and directly. The solution is then specialized to the case where this theory reduces to the linearized theory of Lord and Shulman, and numerical results for various values of material parameters obtained from the ray-series solution in conjunction with the use of Pade approximants are displayed graphically.