A new analytical approach of functionally graded material structures for thermal stress BEM analysis

This paper presents a new approach using analytical expressions in the radial integration boundary element method (RIBEM) for 2D and 3D thermal stress analysis of structures consisting of functionally graded materials. This approach can improve the computational efficiency considerably and can overcome the time-consuming deficiency of RIBEM in computing involved radial integrals. Using this equation together with the three-step multi-domain BEM technique, thermal stress analysis can be carried out for complicated structures comprised of arbitrarily many numbers of media with varying material properties. The Kelvin fundamental solutions independent of elastic modulus are used in this paper. As a result, the resulting integral equations include domain integrals due to the non-homogeneity and temperature variations of the material. All these domain integrals are transformed into equivalent boundary integrals using the radial integration method (RIM), resulting in a pure boundary element analysis algorithm. Numerical examples are given to demonstrate the efficiency of the presented approach.