Thermoelastic Stress Analysis of Structures Under Natural Vibrations

The paper focuses on stress analyses of structures subjected to excitation forces operating at resonant frequencies. The structures are analysed experimentally using the Thermoelastic Stress Analysis (TSA) technique. Experiments are carried out for fixed-free beams of different dimensions and materials, and also for a steel rectangular plate with clamped edges. These structures are excited by a shaker via a stinger. For materials with low thermal conductivity, the agreement between the theory, numerical results and experimental results is excellent. As the thermal conductivity of the material is increased, the correspondence is not as close. This is because of non-adiabatic behaviour. The implications of these results are discussed in detail in the paper and a means of deriving the severity of heat transfer is provided. Other factors that influence the TSA results from structures under natural loading are also discussed.