Application of the Staggered Cell-Vertex Finite Volume Method to Thermoelastic Analysis in Heterogeneous Materials

The two-dimensional (2D) staggered cell vertex finite volume method (CV-FVM) has been developed for unsteady thermoelastic problems in heterogeneous materials. The staggered grid technique is employed to incorporate property variation into the course of solution. The capabilities of methods for vibration analysis, unsteady thermoelastic analysis and elastic analysis with orthotropic materials have been validated. The applications of the method to functionally graded materials (FGMs), multi-phase materials with inclusions, and a thermal barrier coating (TBC) with a gradual FGMs layer or a graded microstructure layer have been accessed. The developed method provides accurate thermoelastic fields and avoids artificial discontinuous stress predictions in heterogeneous materials.