Recent advances and progress towards an integrated interdisciplinary thermal-structural finite element technology

An integrated finite element approach is presented for interdisciplinary thermal-structural problems. Of the various numerical approaches, finite element methods with direct time integration procedures are most widely used for these nonlinear problems. Traditionally, combined thermal-structural analysis is performed sequentially by transferring data between thermal and structural analysis. This approach is generally effective and routinely used. However, to solve the combined thermal-structural problems, this approach results in cumbersome data transfer, incompatible algorithmic representations, and different discretized element formulations. The integrated approach discussed in this paper effectively combines thermal and structural fields, thus overcoming the above major shortcomings. The approach follows Lax-Wendroff type finite element formulations with flux and stress based representations. As a consequence, this integrated approach uses common algorithmic representations and element formulations. Illustrative test examples show that the approach is effective for integrated thermal-structural problems.