Solution of steady-state thermoelastic problems using a scaled boundary representation based on nonuniform rational B-splines

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis work explores the application of isogeometric scaled boundary method in the two-dimensional thermoelastic problems of irregular geometry. The proposed method inherits the advantages of both isogeometric analysis and scaled boundary finite element method and overcomes their respective disadvantages. In the proposed approach, the boundaries of the problem domain are discretized with nonuniform rational B-splines (NURBS) basis functions, while the temperature distributions inside the domain are represented by a sequence of power functions in terms of radial coordinate within the framework of scaled boundary finite element method. The resulting solution of the stress in radial direction can be computed analytically for the temperature changes. The construction of tensor product structure is circumvented for the two-dimensional problems as only the boundary information of the problem domain is required. Hence, the flexibility to represent the complex geometry can be significantly improved in the proposed method. Numerical examples are presented to validate the performance of the proposed method where it is seen that superior accuracy, efficiency, and convergence behavior can be achieved over the conventional scaled boundary finite element method.