Multiscale thermoelastic modelling of composite strands using the “fundamental solutions” method

Abstract

A novel computationally effective approach to multiscale thermoelastic modelling of composite structures and its application to a thermomechanical analysis of two ITER superconducting strands is presented. Homogenisation and recovering problems are solved by means of the “fundamental solutions” method, which was expanded to the case of thermoelastic analysis. We describe a general procedure of multiscale analysis on the basis of this method and apply it to recover stresses at the microscopic scale of a composite strands using a two-level procedure. The recovered micro-stresses are found to be in good correlation with the stresses obtained in the reference problem where the entire composite structure was modelled with a fine mesh.