A Method for Thermal Loading Design to Reduce Stresses

Thermal loading is one of the most important issues which results in thermal stresses in different bodies. Thermal stresses may be large and have to be considered in the design processes. Although thermal stresses are usually treated as non-desired factors, in this paper we proposed to use thermal stresses in a body with elastic loading to reduce elastic stresses and consequently increase the maximum allowable loading. In the proposed method, thermal loading is generated by applying a heat flux on parts of the boundary of the body or heat generation inside a portion of its domain. In each case the distribution of the thermal load is obtained so that the maximum stress in the body becomes minimum. To determine the unknown distribution of the thermal load, first we modeled it as a multi-parameter function with some unknown parameters; then, by a sensitivity analysis and some mathematical operations, the optimized values of the parameters are found. To see the application, in this paper, several examples are presented to show the performance and the efficiency of the proposed method. The cases which are studied in the current work show that the proposed method for reducing elastic stresses by employing thermal loading is effective and the maximum stress can be decreased considerably.