ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the field equations governing thermoelastic time-dependent deformation of homogeneous elastic media. It presents a brief derivation of the linearized equations of motion. An elastic medium has a natural undeformed state in the absence of any external or internal mechanical or other sources of disturbance acting on it. If the material is isotropic, then there are no preferred directions in the material, and the elastic stiffness constants are the same independent of the choice of the coordinate axes in which the stress and strain tensor components are expressed. In the former case, the laminated medium can be characterized as a homogeneous anisotropic medium having an axis of elastic symmetry that is perpendicular to the plane of each lamina. The effective properties of such a medium are the static effective properties.
