Analysis of transient uncoupled thermoelastic problems involving moving point heat sources using the method of fundamental solutions

Abstract

The method of fundamental solutions (MFS) is very effective for analysis of problems with moving domain loads. In this work, the MFS is formulated for solution of two dimensional transient uncoupled thermoelastic problems involving moving point heat sources. At first, the time-dependent temperature field is obtained by solving the transient heat conduction equation involving a moving heat source term. Then, at each time point, the temperature field is used in the constitutive and equilibrium equations to determine the displacement field. The intensity and location of the point heat source can be arbitrary functions of time. The particular solutions for temperature and stress are described by simple and closed-form expressions and they are used without considering any internal points. Two numerical example problems are provided to demonstrate the efficiency of the presented formulation. The obtained numerical results show that the presented MFS is very efficient and useful. Unlike the finite element method, only a small number of collocation and source points are sufficient to achieve very accurate results in the proposed MFS.