Coupled horizontal and rocking vibrations of a rigid circular plate on a transversely isotropic bi-material interface

This paper investigates the coupled rocking and horizontal vibratory response of a rigid circular plate embedded in viscoelastic, transversely isotropic, three-dimensional unbounded media. The boundary-value problem corresponding to the case of distributed horizontal and rocking ring loads at a bi-material interface is solved to obtain the required influence functions for the solution of the present problem. The case of an embedded rigid plate is formulated in terms of a discretized integral equation, which couples the rigid body displacements of the plate with the tractions acting over its contact surface through a set of displacement influence functions. The system of resulting discretized integral equations is solved numerically. The solution results in the tractions over each disc element. This paper carefully takes into account the coupling of the rocking and horizontal responses of the plates that is typical of non-homogeneous interfaces, i.e., their horizontal displacements due to rocking moments and their rotations due to horizontal loads. The dynamic direct and cross compliances of the embedded plate are shown for different governing parameters such as frequency of excitation and bi-material configuration. The present results are useful to the study of dynamic response of deeply buried foundations and anchors in non-homogeneous soils.