On thermoelastic transients in a general theory of heat conduction with finite wave speeds

Summary The linear Chen-Gurtin-Pipkin theory of heat conduction in a deformable material is employed to study the one dimensional problem of a homogeneous thermoelastic half space subjected to thermal and mechanical disturbances at its boundary. A ray series approach is used to generate asymptotic wavefront expansions for the temperature, strain, and stress response of the medium to the disturbances. General properties of the propagation process are obtained simply and directly. We specialize the solution to the case for which this theory reduces to that of Lord and Shulman and demonstrate that our results for this example agree with asymptotic results obtained previously by other investigators.With 6 Figures