The stress and the displacement for a distributed load on an area:

We want to find out the surface depression at a location B and stress distribution at an interior point A due to a distributed pressure acting on the surface area S. We can change to a polar coordinate with origin at B, hence the pressure acting at an elemental area C is equivalent to a force .

The displacement of the surface at B due to this force can be written from equation 5.17, by putting The displacement at B, due to the distribution of load over the whole area S is given by,

	(5.18)

The stress components at A can be found out by integrating the stress components given in equation 5.16.