Transient coupled thermo-elasticity analysis of a temperature-dependent thick-walled cylinder under cyclic thermo-mechanical loads

Several studies have reported the solution of the classical coupled thermo-elasticity for thick-walled cylinders under different boundary conditions; however very limited studies have been conducted on the analysis of temperature-dependent thick-walled cylinders under cyclic nonlinear boundary conditions. Therefore, this study investigates the transient response of temperature-dependent thick-walled cylinders under cyclic nonlinear thermo-mechanical loads based on classical coupled thermo-elasticity. Also, it studies the impact of considering temperature-dependent material properties (TDMP) and temperature-independent material properties (TIMP) hypotheses on the accuracy of the results. The governing equations of the classical nonlinear coupled thermo-elasticity are numerically solved based on the finite-difference method, namely the Crank-Nicolson method. Then, an experimental setup is designed to further investigate the impact of considering TDMP and TIMP through a temperature measurement of the outer surface of a machine gun barrel under burst shooting. It has been found that considering TIMP overestimates the residual temperature and residual stress values through the cylinder thickness compared with TDMP. Moreover, based on the temperature measurement, TDMP estimates results with higher accuracy of 7% than TIMP.