Transient thermal mechanical analyses using a face-based smoothed finite element method (FS-FEM)

•We extend a face-based smoothed finite element method (FS-FEM) to deal with the transient thermal mechanical problems of 3-D solids.•Material properties' parameters are considered to be temperature-dependent. Thermo-elastic and thermo-elastic–plastic problems are investigated.•The FS-FEM performs much better than the standard FEM when using the same tetrahedral meshes.

A face-based smoothed finite element method (FS-FEM) is formulated for transient thermal mechanical analyses of 3-D solids with nonlinearity. For this face-based smoothed finite element method, the problem domain is first discretized into a set of tetrahedral elements, and the face-based smoothing domains are further formed along the faces of the tetrahedral meshes. The smoothing operations are performed in these smoothing domains. Several numerical examples with different kinds of boundary conditions are investigated in this paper. Compared with the 4-node tetrahedral FEM, the FS-FEM can achieve much better accuracy and higher convergence when dealing with the thermal mechanical analyses of 3-D solids.