Dislocations with Corners in an Elastic Body with Applications to Fault Detection

This paper focuses on an elastic dislocation problem that is motivated by applications in the geophysical and seismological communities. In our model, the displacement satisfies the Lamé system in a bounded domain with a mixed homogeneous boundary condition. We also allow the occurrence of discontinuities in both the displacement and traction fields on the fault curve/surface. By the variational approach, we first prove the well-posedness of the direct dislocation problem in a rather general setting with the Lamé parameters being real-valued ∞ functions and satisfy the strong convexity condition. Next, by considering that the Lamé parameters are constant and the fault curve/surface possesses certain corner singularities, we establish a local characterization of the jump vectors at the corner points over the dislocation curve/surface. In our study, the dislocation is geometrically rather general and may be open or closed. We establish the unique results for the inverse problem of determining the dislocation curve/surface and the jump vectors for both cases. © 2025 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.