Boundary element method for thermoelastic analysis of three-dimensional transversely isotropic solids

Thermal effects are well known to manifest themselves as additional volume integral terms in the direct formulation of the boundary integral equation (BIE) for linear elastic solids when using the boundary element method (BEM). This domain integral has been successfully transformed in an exact manner to surface ones only in isotropy and in 2D anisotropy, thereby restoring the BEM as a truly boundary solution technique. The difficulties with extending it to 3D general anisotropic solids lie in the mathematical complexity of the Green’s function and its derivatives for such materials. These quantities are required items in the BEM formulation. In this paper, the exact, analytical transformation of the volume integral associated with thermal effects to surface ones is achieved for a transversely isotropic material using a similar approach which the authors have previously employed for the same task in BEM for 2D general anisotropy. A numerical scheme, however, needs to be employed to evaluate some of the new terms introduced in the surface integrals that arise from this process here. The mathematical soundness of the formulation is demonstrated by a few examples; the numerical results obtained are checked by alternative means, including those obtained from the commercial FEM code, ANSYS.