3D Thermal Analysis of Hybrid Composite Structures

Abstract

In the case of composite structures 3D finite elements or finite difference methods are commonly used for the evaluation of the temperature fields. This leads to a high effort on discretization and computation, especially for transient load cases. Therefore, 2D finite elements have been developed based on a layerwise theory to calculate the full 3D temperature field of hybrid composite structures showing different thermal conductivity in thickness direction for each layer. Using heat transfer equilibrium conditions in thickness direction it is possible to account for linear or quadratic shape functions over the thickness for each layer, leaving the number of functional degrees of freedom independent from the number of layers