Thermo-mechanical analysis of functionally graded cylindrical vessels using edge-based smoothed finite element method

• We extend an edge-based smoothed finite element method (ES-FEM) to deal with the thermo-mechanical analyses of FGM cylindrical vessels.
• Several numerical examples with different kinds of boundary conditions are investigated.
• The ES-FEM can achieve much better accuracy and higher convergence rate than the FEM, when dealing with the analyses of FGM cylindrical vessels.

In this paper, an edge-based smoothed finite element method (ES-FEM) is further formulated to deal with the thermo-mechanical analyses of functionally graded cylindrical vessels. In the ES-FEM, the problem domain is first discretized into 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 FGM cylindrical vessels are assumed to be made of ceramics and metals whose volume fractions vary continuously in the radius direction according to a power law. Different material model and thermal boundary conditions are studied. The present formulation is straight-forward and no penalty parameters or additional degrees of freedom are utilized. Numerical examples are given to demonstrate the effectivity of ES-FEM for thermo-mechanical analysis of functionally graded cylindrical vessels.