11th International Conference on the Mechanical Behavior of Materials Analysis of Defects in Viscoelastic Solids by a Transformed Boundary Element Method

Abstract

Due to the inclusion of time as an independent variable to describe the mechanical behavior of viscoelastic materials, the available analytical solutions have been obtained only for a few simplified problems. To study the mechanical behavior of viscoelastic solids, the numerical approaches such as finite element method (FEM) and boundary element method (BEM) are normally needed. The main advantages of BEM are the reduction of the problem dimension by one and the exact satisfaction of certain boundary conditions for particular problems if their associated fundamental solutions are embedded in boundary element formulation. Through the use of correspondence principle, the viscoelastic solids can be effectively treated in Laplace domain. To take advantage of the available fundamental solutions for the defects in anisotropic elastic materials, in this paper we use the transformed BEM to treat the problems of viscoelastic solids containing defects such as holes, cracks, or inclusions. By using the subregion technique, the problems with simultaneous existence of multiple holes, cracks, and inclusions can also be treated. The main feature of this proposed method is that no meshes are needed along the boundary of defects and the boundary conditions are satisfied exactly, which means that the present approach should be more efficient and correct.