Abstract
The elastodynamics of an orthotropic half-space coated by a thin orthotropic layer is theoretically investigated in this article. We newly propose explicit expressions of free Rayleigh waves in a layered half-space that are dependent on only one unknown constant representing amplitude. The main contribution is on deriving, in a simple manner, the theoretical predictions of far-field Rayleigh wave motion arising from time-harmonic loads using elastodynamic reciprocity theorems. These are the very first closed-form exact solutions found for the forced motion of Rayleigh waves in a layered half-space of orthotropic materials. To demonstrate the theoretical results, computation of Rayleigh wave motion in a jointed rock, including a layer of quartz-schist and a half-space of soil, is considered. We present the phase and group dispersion curves superimposed with the amplitude spectra that provide useful information on wave modes, frequencies, and displacement amplitudes. The inclusion of the amplitude spectra in the dispersion curves is a significant improvement over other dispersion curves currently available in the literature. The analytical predictions are compared with numerical results found by finite element analysis, and they show excellent agreement for the cases of a uniform distributed load and a varying distributed load both applied over a strip on the layer surface. The calculations obtained in the current study could generally be very useful for applications in seismology and materials characterization of coated structures.
Introduction
The study of elastic waves in layered half-space structures is of great importance in seismology and geophysics. Seismologists and geophysicists are interested in understanding and predicting the behavior of seismic waves, including P, S, and Rayleigh surface waves, under different earthquake loadings. A numerical analysis of stress wave propagation through a joint rock mass, including three orthogonal sets, was explored. 1 It used orthotropic continua to replace the discontinuous media and transferred the problem into an equivalent continuous model. The dynamic response agreed with the in-situ records and the response obtained by discrete modeling. Rayleigh waves in a self-reinforced layer over an inhomogeneous half-space were studied for geophysical and civil engineering applications. 2 In particular, they discussed the influence of inhomogeneity parameters and layer thickness on the Rayleigh wave phase velocity. In another study, Gupta and Ahmed 3 obtained analytical solutions of Rayleigh waves in a layered structure consisting of an anisotropic layer and a sandy medium. Moreover, Rayleigh waves are commonly employed to inspect and evaluate mechanical and civil engineering structures such as fiber-reinforced polymer-retrofitted concrete structures 4 and composite coating structures.5,6
Fundamentals of propagation of Rayleigh surface waves in a layered half-space are widely available in the literature.7–9 The topic is also discussed in detail in numerous research papers. In particular, Achenbach and Keshava 10 found the dispersion curves of Rayleigh waves in a layered half-space and Tiersten 11 explored the effect of thin films on the propagation of guided waves. The approximate characteristic equations for Rayleigh waves in an orthotropic layered half-space with a sliding contact at the interface were reported by Vinh et al. 12 Elastodynamics of a layered half-space including a thin, soft layer with a clamped upper face overlying a half-space was recently considered. 13 The authors derived the non-traditional boundary conditions along the substrate surface combined with the effect of the layer using a long-wave high-frequency procedure.
The problem of Rayleigh wave motions in layered half-spaces induced by forces is rather complicated and thus there are few published works. The conventional approach is based on integral transform techniques, commonly used to solve wave motions in single solids such as a thin plate and a half-space,7,14 becomes extremely difficult to use in solving the dynamic responses of Rayleigh waves in an orthotropic layered half-space. Xu and Ma 15 used the direct stiffness method and Fourier transform to investigate the responses of a multilayered half-space to a spatially periodic moving load. They derived the displacement and traction components along layer interfaces for both the internal soil layers and the soil half-space. However, the soil materials were all considered homogeneous and isotropic. Based on the dual vector form and the Hankel transform, elastodynamic responses of a multi-layered transversely isotropic piezoelectric medium under time-harmonic loadings were studied. 16 To obtain the piezoelectric field, however, a numerical scheme is required to evaluate the complex integrals that involve products of polynomial and Bessel functions. Recently, Bratov et al. 17 proposed an asymptotic hyperbolic-elliptic expression for Rayleigh waves in a layered half-space subjected to a vertical load.
In recent years, another method has been introduced based on the reciprocity theorem, i.e. a relation between displacements, traction components and forces for two different loading states of a body, to obtain the closed-form solutions of guided wave motions. 18 The approach is simpler than the conventional approach using integral transform techniques 19 and applicable to inhomogeneous solids,20,21 multilayered structures22,23 and anisotropic materials. 24 The validity of the reciprocity-based approach was verified for Rayleigh waves in a half-space; the results found by the reciprocity application are identical to the ones by the integral transform methods.19,24,25
One of the main contributions of this article is to derive the closed-form solutions of Rayleigh wave motions in an orthotropic layered half-space under time-harmonic loads using reciprocity theorems. The reciprocity approach was successfully employed to calculate Rayleigh wave fields in a layered half-space where both the layer and the half-space were homogeneous and isotropic solids. 22 Preliminary results on the progress involved in the current work have also been reported by the authors. 26 The rest of the paper is organized into four sections. The main purpose of Section 2 is to propose explicit expressions of Rayleigh waves propagating in an orthotropic layered half-space. Section 3 discusses the procedure to obtain the closed-form solutions of Rayleigh wave motion due to various time-harmonic loads by application of reciprocity. Section 4 presents several calculations of Rayleigh wave motions in a jointed rock including a quartz-schist layer and a soil half-space.
Moreover, we present the phase and group dispersion curves superimposed with the amplitude spectra that provide useful information on wave modes, frequencies, and displacement amplitudes. The analytical predictions are compared with numerical results found by finite element analysis, and they show excellent agreement for several loading conditions. The calculations obtained in the current study could generally be beneficial for applications in seismology and materials characterization of coated structures. Major conclusions drawn from the present work are given in Section 5.
Propagation of free Rayleigh waves in an orthotropic layered half-space
We propose here the explicit solutions of Rayleigh surface waves traveling in an orthotropic half-space coated by an orthotropic thin layer. These solutions are also important for the computation of Rayleigh wave fields in the layered half-space due to the application of time-harmonic sources using the reciprocity theorem in the following section. Let us begin by considering a layered structure including a layer

Free Rayleigh waves in a layered half-space.
In general, guided waves that propagate in a thin layer can be separated into six partial waves, including three incident waves
Note that the corresponding stress components

Dispersion curves of Rayleigh waves in a rock mass model.
Note that, in Eq. (7), there are only five independent equations with six unknowns
For the layer, the displacement and stress fields can now be rewritten as
Reciprocity application for the calculation of Rayleigh wave motions
This section aims to derive closed-form solutions of Rayleigh waves in an orthotropic layered half-space subjected to a time-harmonic source. It will be shown that the amplitudes of generated Rayleigh waves are obtained, in a simple manner, using reciprocity relations between two loading states of an elastic body expressed as
18

Layered half-space under a time-harmonic load.
We first consider a vertical load applied at
We choose virtual state
Substituting these expressions into Eq. (17) yields
Results and discussions
The analytical solutions derived in the earlier sections are illustrated here by computing the Rayleigh wave motion in a rock mass modeled as a quartz-schist layer overlaid a soil half-space. Material properties of the layer and the half-space are given in Table 1.
1
The layer thickness is chosen as
Material properties of the quartz-schist layer and the soil half-space.
The phase and group velocity dispersion curves superimposed by the displacement amplitudes are plotted in Figure 3. Here, Figure 3(a) and Figure 3(c) show the horizontal-amplitude spectra while Figure 3(b) and Figure 3(d) show the vertical-amplitude spectra. There are upper and lower bounds for the phase velocities in the layered half-space shown in Figure 3(a) and Figure 3(b). In particular, as the thickness of the quartz-schist layer becomes small, the phase velocity of the first Rayleigh mode approaches the value of the Rayleigh wave velocity of the soil half-space
With the presence of the amplitude spectra, the curves produced in this study are considerably superior to other dispersion diagrams available in the literature. They facilitate the analysis of seismic waves, such as source localization or earthquake prediction, based on the observed wave amplitudes. In ultrasonic nondestructive evaluation, the superimposed dispersion curves could offer instant optimal selections of wave modes and frequencies, increasing the signal-to-noise ratio and simplifying signal-processing stages.
Analytical predictions of Rayleigh wave fields presented above are now verified using a finite element simulation carried out by COMSOL Multiphysics software. In this benchmark test, we compute the amplitudes of the Rayleigh waves generated by both a uniform distributed load and a varying distributed load applied over a strip of width
The horizontal displacement amplitudes

Uniform strip load of unit magnitude. Numerical results:

Varying strip load of unit magnitude. Numerical results:
In both cases of loading conditions, comparisons between the analytical prediction and numerical results are in excellent agreement. Small differences appearing in the comparisons are accounted for by the limitation of the numerical approach in dealing with the problems of multi-mode and dispersive guided waves. Due to the closed-form nature of solutions, analytical calculations are performed swiftly in these testing cases, while numerical simulation takes significant time to reproduce these results. Thus, the proposed method could be appropriate for solving inverse problems such as material characterization or defect quantification, which typically necessitate a large amount of data or a fast forward-problem solver. Furthermore, the most intriguing aspect of our approach is that reciprocity calculations can be feasible for individual modes at high frequencies. Thus, the method can perform effectively in highly dispersive regions with numerous overlapping modes, which could be challenging for numerical simulations.
Conclusions
The motion of Rayleigh waves in an orthotropic half-space coated by a thin orthotropic layer due to the application of time-harmonic loadings is discussed in this article. The explicit expressions of Rayleigh surface waves propagating in a layered half-space and that depend on only one unknown amplitude have been introduced. The main contribution is the derivation of the analytical solutions of far-field Rayleigh waves using elastodynamic reciprocity theorems. The proposed approach has shown an advantage for obtaining the Rayleigh wave fields in a simple manner and in closed-form exact solutions. Computation of Rayleigh wave motion in a jointed rock mass, including a quartz-schist layer and a soil half-space, has been demonstrated for the cases of a uniform distributed load and a varying distributed load both applied over a strip on the surface of the quartz-schist layer. In particular, we have presented the dispersion curves superimposed with the amplitude spectra which could offer useful information on Rayleigh wave modes, frequencies, and displacement amplitudes. The comparisons between the analytical predictions and numerical results by finite element analysis have shown excellent agreement. With the closed-form property and applicability to complex structures, the expressions and results reported in this research might be beneficial for application in seismology and materials characterization of coated half-space. Further studies on the propagation of Rayleigh waves in multilayered half-space can be conducted using the reciprocity theorem. These results can serve as fundamental solutions for scattering problems of Rayleigh waves due to a cavity in structures.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
This research is funded by Graduate University of Science and Technology under grant number GUST.STS.ĐT2020-CH01; and Vietnam National Foundation for Science and Technology Development (NAFOSTED) under grant number 107.02-2019.21.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Vietnam National Foundation for Science and Technology Development (NAFOSTED), Graduate University of Science and Technology, (grant number 107.02-2019.21, GUST.STS.ÐT2020-CH01).
Author biography
Ductho Le received his master's degree in Solid Mechanics from VNU University of Science, Hanoi. His research interest includes bone quantitative ultrasound, structural health monitoring, and material characterization.
Yen Nguyen received his PhD in Engineering Physics from Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Vietnam in 2018. His research focuses on Molecular Dynamic Simulation and Physical Optics. He is currently a senior lecturer & researcher at Institute of Theoretical and Applied Research, Duy Tan University.
Hoang Ngoc Quy graduated with a master's degree in Mechanical Engineering from VNU University of Engineering and Technology, Hanoi. His research focuses on solid-body mechanics, vibrations of sound, and ultrasonic waves.
Lawrence H. Le received his PhD degree in Earth Physics and MBA degree in Finance and Technology Commercialization from the University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada, in 1991 and 1999, respectively. He held a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) postdoctoral fellowship at the Schlumberger-Doll Research Laboratory, Ridgefield, CT, USA. He is currently a Clinical Professor leading the graduate program in the Department of Radiology and Diagnostic Imaging and a Senior Medical Physicist with Alberta Health Services, Edmonton, AB. He is also a Senior Visiting Scholar with the Center for Biomedical Engineering, Fudan University, Shanghai, China.
Haidang Phan received his PhD from Pusan National University, South Korea, majoring in Mechanical Engineering in 2013. He has made original and significant contributions to both theoretical and applied studies of guided waves in aerospace composites and in cortical and/or cancellous bones for characterization of their material properties. Currently working as a senior lecturer at the University of Engineering and Technology, Vietnam National University, Dr. Phan published two monographs, several book chapters, along with more than thirty journal papers, and is the principal investigator of several national-funded projects.
Appendix
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