Analysis of the dynamics of rigid blocks using the theory of distributions

The paper aims at providing an original fully distributional approach for the description of the pure rocking motion of a unilateral rigid system undergoing a dynamic excitation. Impulsive and dipolar terms arise in the dynamic equations, which do not seem to alter the piecewise well known solutions. It is proved in the paper that the addition of a null distribution to the original expression of the displacements, produces non-null effects on the response of the system, with the impact obeying to a strongly non-linear equation. It is thus confirmed that rocking block dynamics is a very delicate topic to be treated by numerical analyses.