Dynamic equivalence, self-equilibrated excitation and Saint-Venant’s principle for an elastic strip

The distinction between the near and far-fields for a semi-infinite, elastic strip has been exploited to derive conditions under which different dynamic excitations can be considered as equivalent. These different excitations are equivalent in the sense that they produce the same displacement field far from the excited end. It is shown that dynamically equivalent excitations degenerate to statically equivalent loads in the limit of a vanishing frequency. The no-radiation condition is derived, and its relation to self-equilibrated, dynamic and static loads is presented. Dynamically equivalent excitations are utilized to formulate a dynamic version of Saint-Venant’s principle for symmetric excitations with frequencies below the first cut-off frequency of a strip. It has been shown that the requirement of self-equilibrium of a load for the decay of end effects for static fields can be deduced from the requirement of zero average power for the dynamic fields.