TRANSIENT THERMOELASTICITY AND OTHER BODY FORCE EFFECTS IN BOUNDARY ELEMENT SHAPE SENSITIVITY ANALYSIS

Several new formulations for structural design sensitivity analysis (DSA) of elastic solids are presented that consistently account for steady and transient thermal loading, along with centrifugal and gravity loading. The approach employs implicit differentiation of the discretized boundary integral equations and facilitates the production of accurate and efficient computational procedures that obviate the need for matrix factorizations in the DSA step. For centrifugal, gravity and general thermal loading, a new DSA concept employing a particular integral technique is developed. For centrifugal, gravity and steady thermal effects, a surface integration approach is also presented, and the two methods compared. Alternative strategies for modelling the behaviour of temperature distributions of evolving shapes undergoing shape optimization and the ramifications of these strategies in the DSA process are also discussed. It is shown that, for certain classes of thermoelastic problems, shape optimization can be performed without the need to incorporate thermal analysis or DSA into the overall process. A thermoelastic surface stress sensitivity analysis formulation is presented that does not require additional numerical integration. A new thermoelastic sharp corner traction component consistent sensitivity analysis formulation is also presented. This technique is shown to work for any initial stress distribution. Numerical sensitivity results are presented for many problems with analytical solutions.