International Journal of Engineering and Technology

The Hankel transform method was implemented in this paper to obtain general solutions for stress and displacement fields in homogeneous, isotropic linear elastic, semi-infinite soil subject to uniformly distributed axisymmetric load distribution over a circular area on the surface. The work adopted a stress based formulation. Hankel transformation of the biharmonic stress compatibility equation was done to obtain bounded stress functions for the elastic half space problem. Hankel transformations were also applied to the Love expression to obtain the stresses and displacements in Hankel transform space. Enforcement of boundary conditions yielded the unknown constants of the stress functions for the particular problem considered. Inversion of the Hankel transform expressions for the stresses and displacements yielded the general expressions for stresses and displacements for the semi-infinite linear elastic soil under uniformly distributed load over a circular area on the surface. The solutions obtained were identical with solutions in literature obtained using Boussinesq stress functions.