Coupled thermo-structural analysis of a bimetallic strip using the absolute nodal coordinate formulation

A bimetallic strip consists of two different metal pieces that are bonded together. Due to the different coefficients of thermal expansion, exposing the strip to temperature induces thermal stresses that cause the structure to bend. Most often, incremental finite-element methods that introduce element nodal coordinates have been successfully applied to analyze the thermally induced vibrations in such systems. The exposure of these bimetallic strips to high temperatures results in large deflections and deformations, where the effects of the rigid-body motion and large rotations must be taken into account. For classic, non-isoparametric elements such as beams and plates the incremental methods do not result in zero strains under arbitrary, rigid-body motion. Therefore, in this paper a new model of a bimetallic strip is proposed based on a coupled thermo-structural analysis using the absolute nodal coordinate formulation. The applied, non-incremental, absolute nodal coordinate formulation uses a set of global displacements and slopes so that the beam and the plate elements can be treated as isoparametric elements. In order to simulate the bimetallic strip’s dynamic response, the formulation of the shear-deformable beam element had to be extended with thermally induced stresses. This made it possible to model the coupled thermo-structural problem and to represent the connectivity constraints at the interface between the two strips of metal. The proposed formulation was verified by comparing the responses using a general-purpose finite-element software.