A novel boundary-integral based finite element method for 2D and 3D thermo-elasticity problems

In this article a new hybrid boundary integral-based (HBI) finite element method (FEM) is presented for analyzing two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) thermoelastic problems with arbitrary distribution of body force and temperature changes. The method of particular solution is used to decompose the displacement field into homogeneous part and particular part. The homogeneous solution is obtained by using the HBI-FEM with fundamental solutions, yet the particular solution related to the body force and temperature change is approximated by radial basis function (RBF). The detailed formulation for both 2D and 3D HBI-FEM for thermoelastic problems are given, and two different approaches for treating the inhomogenous terms are presented and compared. Five numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the accuracy and performance of the proposed method. When compared with the existing analytical solutions or ABAQUS results, it is found that the proposed method works well for thermoelastic problems and also when using a very coarse mesh, results with satisfactory accuracy can be obtained.