Transient thermal contact problem for an internal edge crack in a layered cylinder

Abstract

The transient thermoelastic behavior of a two-layer annular circular cylinder with an internal edge crack subjected to a sudden heating is investigated in this paper. It is shown that surface heating may induce the compressive thermal stress near the inner surface of the inner cylinder which in turn may force the cracked surfaces to close together. Assuming that the existence of the crack does not alter the temperature distribution, we can divide this problem into two parts and solve them by the principle of superposition. First, the temperature and transient thermal stress distributions along the axisymmetric surface of the imaginary cylinders without crack are obtained by finite element/implicit time integration method including quadratic layer and interface elements. Secondly, the opposite sense of the stress distributions along the cracked surfaces, which are obtained previously, are treated as the traction boundary conditions, the contact length and contact pressure of the real cracked cylinder are obtained by modified elimination finite element scheme. Finally, we obtained the normalized stress intensity factor for the crack tip of the cylinder. It is shown that the larger the crack length ratio, the higher the stress intensity factor. The calculated results indicated that the stress intensity factor becomes smaller as the inner and outer radius ratio increases.