Thermal stress analysis of axisymmetric bodies via the boundary element method

A time dependent boundary element method (BEM) for evaluating thermal stresses in an axisymmetric thermoelastic body has been developed. Previous BEM work on axisymmetric thermoelasticity is extended to permit the calculation of stresses at both boundary and interior points. However, the new formulation still requires only surface discretization and is capable of very accurate evaluation of stress. The boundary displacement integral equation is successively differentiated to obtain the corresponding stress and strain integral equations. Explicit expressions for the steady-state axisymmetric fundamental solutions are derived in this process. The non-steady components of the integrands are obtained directly from the corresponding three-dimensional counterparts. The numerical implementation of this formulation is carried out within a general purpose BEM computer code and several numerical examples are presented to illustrate the accuracy and applicability of the method.