An analysis of stress intensity factor for thermal transient problems based on green's function

Abstract

An efficient numerical method is presented to compute the stress intensity factor for the cracked body subjected to a thermal transient loading. It was developed on the basis of the Green's function concept and Duhamel's theorem. The stress intensity factor due to the thermal transient loading was calculated by an integration over the elapsed time interval for the product of the boundary temperature and the Green's function. The Green's function of the present method represents the change in stress intensity factor for the cracked body subjected to a Heaviside step function of the boundary temperature, and it can be determined by any method proven so far. The cracked wall and cracked pipe subjected to thermal transient loading were analyzed, for practical applications. The stress intensity factors obtained from the present method have shown good agreement with those evaluated by the standard finite element analysis. Compared to the transient finite element method, the present method is known to be more effective in view of computational aspect without sacrificing the solution accuracy.