Unsteady thermal stress analysis in three-dimensional problems by means of the thermoelastic displacement potential and the boundary element method

A numerical method to analyse unsteady thermal stresses in three-dimensional problems is proposed. It is shown that three-dimensional unsteady thermal stress problems can be easily solved without the volume integral by means of the thermoelastic displacement potential and the boundary element method. It is also shown that the time integral can be easily carried out analytically. In order to investigate the accuracy of this method, unsteady thermal stress distributions for a sphere and a circular cylinder are obtained. As a numerical example for which it is difficult to obtain the analytical solution, thermal displacements and surface stress distributions for a torus are obtained.