Reflection of elastic and plastic acceleration waves

The reflected wave pattern produced when an acceleration wave is incident on a bounding surface of a homogeneously prestressed elastic plastic solid was investigated. An examination of a system of quasilinear first order partial differential equations which govern the motion of the medium under consideration are presented. The dependent variables are the components of particle velocity and the components of stress. Equations governing acceleration wave speeds and discontinuities are obtained by application of power series expansions of the dependent variables and functions of dependent variables about the wave front. The series are substituted into the governing partial differential equations, and coefficients of like power are equated. For an elastic or plastic wave the result is a system of homogeneous algebraic equations.