Implementation of thermoelastic forces in boundary element analysis of elastic contact and fracture mechanics problems

This paper presents a pseudo-body-force approach multi-domain boundary integral equation method for the analysis of thermoelastic and body-force type elastic contact and fracture mechanics problems. Using this approach only the boundaries of the bodies involved have to be discretized. The transformation of the domain integrals due to body-force and pseudo-force to their equivalent boundary integrals are shown. Also, it is shown that by employing the initial strain approach the same set of equivalent boundary integrals would be obtained. Isoparametric quadratic elements are employed to represent the geometries and the functions. This two-dimensional BEM thermoelastic implementation can be found very simple and can be applied to both harmonic and nonharmonic temperature distributions. The accuracy is asserted by applying it to several thermoelastic fracture mechanics and contact problems.