Destabilization of long-wavelength Love and Stoneley waves in slow sliding

Love waves are dispersive interfacial waves that are a mode of response for anti-plane motions of an elastic layer bonded to an elastic half-space. Similarly, Stoneley waves are interfacial waves in bonded contact of dissimilar elastic half-spaces, when the displacements are in the plane of the solids. It is shown that in slow sliding, long wavelength Love and Stoneley waves are destabilized by friction. Friction is assumed to have a positive instantaneous logarithmic dependence on slip rate and a logarithmic rate weakening behavior at steady-state. Long wavelength instabilities occur generically in sliding with rate- and state-dependent friction, even when an interfacial wave does not exist. For slip at low rates, such instabilities are quasi-static in nature, i.e., the phase velocity is negligibly small in comparison to a shear wave speed. The existence of an interfacial wave in bonded contact permits an instability to propagate with a speed of the order of a shear wave speed even in slow sliding, indicating that the quasi-static approximation is not a valid one in such problems.

K. Ranjith · 2008