THERMO-MECHANICAL ANALYSES OF COMPOSITE STRUCTURES USING FACE-BASED SMOOTHED FINITE ELEMENT METHOD

Abstract

A face-based smoothed finite element method (FS-FEM) is extended to deal with the transient thermal mechanical analyses of composite structures. For this method, the problem domain is first discretized into a set of tetrahedral elements, and the face-based smoothing domains are further formed along the faces of the tetrahedral meshes. The smoothed Galerkin weak form is employed to obtain discretized system equations, and the face-based smoothing domains are used to perform the smoothing operation. After applying these approaches, the numerical integration becomes a simple summation over each smoothing domain. Several composite structures with different kinds of boundary conditions are studied in this paper. Compared with the 4-node tetrahedral FEM, the FS-FEM can achieve much better accuracy and higher convergence when using the same tetrahedral mesh.