THERMO-ELECTRO-MECHANICAL COUPLING PROBLEMS SOLVED BY FE-FORMULATION

Coupled problems are of great interest in the area of technical applic ations. In the current paper we present, the theory of thermo-electrom echanical coupling and provide a discretization by using the method of finite elements. The thermo-electro-mechanical effect presents a phys ical interaction between the fundamental quantities of the sub-domains elastomechanics, electrostatics and heat balance. Throughout thermody namic analysis we derive the constitutive equations which describe the above behaviour and relate the main quantities which describe the thr ee fields. From the principal equations of elastomechanics, electrosta tics and heat balance separately, we derive the weak formulation of th e load equilibrium, the electrostatic equilibrium and the heat balance individually. Furthermore a FE-formulation leads the weak formulation s of the coupled problem to a system of three coupling differential eq uations. This system is nonlinear with respect to the temperature and we solve it using an incremental solution. The numerical result is to be shown on a one-dimensional test example.