A traction-recovery method for evaluating boundary stresses on thermal elasticity problems of FGMs

A new approach is presented to calculate boundary stresses in thermal stress analysis of structures consisting of functionally grades materials (FGMs) based on the traction-recovery method. In this approach, the in-plane strains are calculated first using the computed nodal displacements by simply differentiating shape functions at the point of interest, and then the boundary stresses are recovered by Hooke׳s law together with the known tractions on the boundary. This approach has the advantage of without need to evaluate strongly singular boundary integrals. With the comparison to the FEM software ANSYS, two numerical examples for plane stress and 3D problems are presented to verify the correctness of the proposed method in evaluating boundary thermal-stresses of FGMs.