THERMO-MECHANICAL ANALYSIS OF COMPOSITE PRESSURE VESSELS USING EDGE-BASED SMOOTHED FINITE ELEMENT METHOD

Abstract

In this paper, an edge-based smoothed finite element method (ES-FEM) is further formulated to deal with the thermo-mechanical analysis of composite pressure vessels. In the ES-FEM, the problem domain is first discretized into a set of triangular elements, and the edge-based smoothing domains are further formed along the edges of the triangular meshes. In order to improve the accuracy, the stiffness matrices are calculated using the strain smoothing technique in these smoothing domains. The thermal and mechanical properties are assumed to vary between different layers. The present formulation is straight-forward and no penalty parameters or additional degrees of freedom are used. Several numerical examples are given to demonstrate the effectivity of ES-FEM for thermo-mechanical analysis of composite pressure vessels.