Thermoelastic coupling problems caused by thermal contact resistance: A discontinuous Galerkin finite element approach

Abstract

A discontinuous Galerkin (DG) finite element method is presented to solve the thermoelastic coupling problems caused by temperature and pressure dependent thermal contact resistance (TCR). The whole analysis is made up of two parts, thermal and mechanical analysis. In thermal analysis, the DG method is employed to simulate the temperature jump phenomenon, which satisfies the imperfect thermal contact condition in a straightforward manner. In mechanical analysis, the impenetrability condition is fulfilled through a DG approach with penalty functions. The Picard iteration procedure with a relaxation technique is also adopted to accelerate the rate of convergence and avoid numerical instability. Numerical examples show that the present method is an attractive approach for solving thermoelastic coupling problems caused by TCR. The methodology can also be expanded to solve problems with friction finite deformation contact, node-to-segment contact and node-to-surface contact, etc. in a straightforward manner.