APPLIED FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS (ME7920) NAME : M.

KARTHICK
ASSIGNMENT -6 ROLL NO : AE12M009
Date: 08 Mar 2013

Thermal Load vector for a Beam Element:

A multi layered beam made of different materials, each layer is assumed to be

homogeneous and isotropic. The elastic modulus (E) and the thermal expansion co-efficient (α) are
different for each layer. Because displacements should be continuous along the interface of any two
neighboring layers. Each layer of the beam is modeled with the beam element with only
displacement degrees of freedom, the rotation degrees of freedom are considered for evaluating the
thermal load vector. The beam elements have the same length through layers even if they may have
different length along the beam direction.

For each beam element, the element stiffness matrix and column vector are computed and
assembled, with the shared degrees of freedom among beam elements. The element stiffness matrix
calculated, which is combination of bending stiffness and the transverse shear stiffness (shown
below) is used for thermal analysis. The thermal load vector is computed using the formula shown
below.

Where Fth is the thermal load vector for the beam element, E is the Elastic modulus, α is the thermal
expansion co-efficient, and ∆T is the change of temperature of the beam element. The matrix [Bb] is
shown below.

The integration limits l and h denote the element length and height, respectively. Carrying out the
integration

After solving the nodal displacements, the bending stress at the bottom and top of an
element due to the thermal load is obtained from

1|Page
 APPLIED FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS (ME7920) NAME : M.KARTHICK
ASSIGNMENT -6 ROLL NO : AE12M009
Date: 08 Mar 2013

Figure -1. Layer Beam with different materials.

Subscript x indicates bending stress, and b and t denotes the bottom and top layers on the
beam element. ui is the nodal displacements as shown in figure -2.

Figure -2 Nodal displacements for beam element considered only displacements and no rotatioions.

The average shear stress at an element is computed from

2|Page
 APPLIED FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS (ME7920) NAME : M.KARTHICK
ASSIGNMENT -6 ROLL NO : AE12M009
Date: 08 Mar 2013

The transverse normal stress is computed from the transverse shear stress

Where the integration is through the thickness of the top layer for σy on the upper interface and the
thickness of the bottom layer for σy on the lower interface if there are three layers.

Beam Element Stiffness Matrix for only Displacements.

3|Page