The behavior of vertically non-homogeneous elastic solids under internal rectangular loads

This paper examines the internal rectangular loading problems for an elastic halfspace where the shear modulus varies exponentially or linearly and the Poisson’s ratio keeps constant or varies linearly with depth. The numerical method is developed through applying the fundamental solution of layered elastic solids and integrating numerically it over the loading area. The adaptive integration of the displacement and traction integrals over the loading area is designed to calculate the nearly singular integral for the source point close to an element. The discretization approach is applied to deal with an arbitrarily depth-heterogeneous elastic solid. OpenMP directives are used to parallelize the internal loop, which controls element iterations so that a high computing speed can be obtained. For an axisymmetric internal loading problem, the displacements obtained with the present formulation are in a very good agreement with existing closed-form solutions. Finally, stresses and displacements in non-homogeneous halfspaces induced by horizontally and vertically uniform rectangular loadings are presented. Results illustrate the effect of non-homogeneous properties on the stress and displacement fields.