The problem of a moving subsonic edge dislocation near an interface solved with only discrete image dislocations

Abstract The use of only discrete edge image dislocations to solve the problem of an edge dislocation, moving or stationary, near a welded interface separating material of different elastic constants (or a free surface) is thwarted, as is well known, because an image edge dislocation cannot deal simultaneously with the continuity at the interface of both the shear traction stress and the normal traction stress. In this paper, it is shown that the problem can be solved with only discrete edge image dislocation components if an edge dislocation is first separated into an edge dislocation component whose stress–displacement fields depend only on the shear wave velocity and an edge dislocation component whose stress–displacement fields depend only on the longitudinal wave velocity. Keywords: image dislocationsdislocation dynamicsdislocation theory Acknowledgements I thank the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions for improving this paper.