Interfacial stresses at two-material interfaces and initial displacement field over the entire domain are obtained by modifying the potential energy functional with a penalty function, which enforces continuity of the stresses at the interface of two ...
Interfacial stresses at two-material interfaces and initial displacement field over the entire domain are obtained by modifying the potential energy functional with a penalty function, which enforces continuity of the stresses at the interface of two materials. Based on the initial displacement field and interfacial stresses, a new methodology to generate a continuous stress field over the entire domain has been proposed by combining the modified projection method of stress-smoothing and Loubignac's iterative method of improving the displacement field. Stress analysis is carried out on two examples made of dissimilar materials : one is a two-material cantilever composed of highly dissimilar materials and the other is a zirconium-lined cladding tube made of slightly dissimilar materials. Results of the analysis show that the proposed method provides an improved continuous stress field over the entire domain, and accurately predicts the nodal stresses at the interface, while the conventional displacement-based finite element method produces significant stress discontinuities at the interface. In addition, the total strain energy evaluated from the improved continuous stress field converges to the exact value in a few iterations.