A novel method of thermo-mechanical coupled analysis based on the unified description

Abstract A novel method of the thermo-mechanical coupled analysis which is based on the unified description is proposed. In the traditional methods, the displacement and the temperature field were solved in different meshes, which resulted in a series of data mapping problems in joint simulation. In order to integrate the heat transfer with the continuum mechanics, a unified description for the displacement and the temperature field is proposed. Based on this idea, a thermal integrated Absolute Nodal Coordinate Formulation fully parameterized beam element is constructed. The dynamic equations and the heat transfer equations are established using a unified element mesh. Thermal deformation and deformation heating caused by material viscosity are both introduced for describing the bidirectional coupling effect of the two physical fields. Accordingly, the energy conservation property and the transformation between different forms of energy within the thermo-mechanical coupled system could be depicted. A scheme based on the generalized-α method is presented to solve the two sets of governing equations synchronously. Several numerical examples are given to demonstrate the feasibility of the presented method.