Thermal Stress Analysis by Mesh Superposition Method(1st Report, Formulation of Mesh Superposition Method for Thermal Stress Analysis)

Abstract

It is well known that at the meso-scale, a fusion cast refractory usually exhibits local heterogeneities. During the fabrication or heating process, these heterogeneities generate stresses that might lead to failure. It is very necessary to investigate these microscopic stresses associated to the local heterogeneities. It is also difficult to analyze the microscopic stress using a traditional procedure such as the finite element method. This is mainly due to the fact that we cannot numerically solve the stress without considering the multi -scale problem, i.e. the coupling of macro- and meso-scale. In this paper we propose the use of the mesh superposition method, which is one of the effective multi-scale numerical methods, to analyze the correlation between the local and global behavior. The advantage of this method resides in the possibility of performing the stress analysis on both of the macro- and the mesostructures simultaneously by superimposing the local mesh that expresses the local heterogeneity, such as an inclusion, onto the global mesh that expresses the homogenous media. The results obtained by our proposed procedure and those obtained by the traditional method using a fine mesh were compared. The comparison revealed that the results of both procedures were very close. This validation proves that our proposed procedure has a good accuracy to justify its use instead of time consuming traditional method with a fine mesh.