Diffraction of Elastic Waves by a Wedge with Free Boundaries

The scattering of elastic waves set up by a transient body force in the interior of an infinite wedge is investigated by transform methods when the wedge has free surfaces. Exact forms are found for those stress components which are required to vanish at the free surfaces, while the remaining elastodynamic field components can be found by application of Green's identity. Two distinct forms of solution are found. The solution which applies to the case of diffraction by a convex wedge does not hold in the non-convex case; the correction needed to satisfy the edge condition in the anomalous case is associated with a mode transformation which is not present in the convex wedge.