Coupled thermo-mechanical finite element models with node-dependent kinematics for multi-layered shell structures

Node-dependent Kinematic (NDK) shell finite element (FE) formulations are presented for the steady-state thermo-mechanical analysis of laminated structures. The displacements and temperature change are treated as primary variables in the FE models and are directly solved through the coupled thermo-mechanical models. The enforcement of distributed temperature boundary conditions on the top or the bottom surface of hierarchical shell elements is conducted through the Linear Least Squares. The effectiveness of the proposed FE approaches is verified by comparing the results against those from the literature. The application of adaptive refinement approach based on the hierarchical elements and NDK to build FE models with optimal efficiency is demonstrated through numerical examples.