Hybrid Trefftz finite element method for heat conduction in cylindrical composite laminates

Abstract

Laminated composites are made of continuous fibers and matrix which can provide required engineering properties. This paper proposed a hybrid Trefftz finite element method for the analysis of conductive heat transfer in cylindrical composite laminates by assuming two independent temperature fields. The non-conforming intra-element field which is approximated by a linear combination of T-complete solutions satisfying the governing equation and undetermined coefficients is defined within the element domain, while the auxiliary conforming frame field which is interpolated by standard one-dimensional shape functions is defined on the element boundary. Due to the fabrication characteristics of laminates, each layer can be treated as an orthotropic medium for which the hybrid functional is employed to enforce the continuity of temperature and heat flux across the interface of adjacent elements. The proposed method is tested on three numerical examples and compared with exact or ABAQUS solutions. It was found that the proposed method exhibits low sensitivity to mesh distortion and achieves more acceptable results compared with ABAQUS.