Antiplane (SH) Waves Diffraction by a Semicircular Cylindrical Hill Revisited: An Improved Analytic Wave Series Solution

An improved accurate closed-form wave function analytic solution of two-dimensional scattering and diffraction of antiplane SH waves by a semicircular cylindrical hill on an elastic half space is presented. In the previous solution, stress and displacement residual auxiliary functions were defined at the circular interface above and below the circular hill. The method of weighted residues (moment method) was used to solve for the unknown scattered and transmitted waves by requiring each term of Fourier series expansion of these auxiliary residual functions to vanish. It was found that the stress residual amplitudes on both (left and right) rims of the hill (ideally should be zero) are not numerically insignificant, irrespective of how many terms used. It was pointed out that the shear stress at the rim is infinite, and that the stress auxiliary function is discontinuous at both rims of the hill, exhibiting a problem for the numerical solution that is more complicated than Gibbs’ phenomenon. The problem with the overshoot of the stress residual amplitudes at the rim was most likely numerical. In this paper, all displacement and stress waves were expressed as cosine functions, and the solution of the circular hill problem was reformulated in this paper, and, for the solution to be correct, the computed stress and displacement residual amplitudes were shown to be numerically negligible everywhere, including those at both rims of the hill. Displacements at higher frequencies are also computed.