Trapped modes due to narrow cracks in thin simply-supported elastic plates

We consider an elastic plate of infinite length and constant width supported simply along its two parallel edges and having a finite length crack along its centreline. In particular, we look for and find trapped modes (localised oscillations) in the presence of the crack. An explicit wide-spacing approximation based on the Wiener-Hopf technique applied to incident wave scattering by semi-infinite cracks is complemented by an exact formulation of the problem in the form of integro-differential equations. An application of a Galerkin method for the numerical calculation of results from the latter method leads to a novel explicit ‘small-spacing’ approximation. In combination with the wide-spacing results this is shown to provide accurate results for all lengths of crack.