Boundary element analysis of two- and three-dimensional thermo-elastic problems with various concentrated heat sources

A heat source can be concentrated at a point, along a line, or over an area in a domain or distributed over the whole domain. In this paper, a boundary element formulation for thermo-elastic analysis of isotropic media with point, line, or area heat sources is presented. Temperature, displacement, and stress analyses are performed without internal points or cells and without any need to find the temperature distribution through the domain. Several numerical examples are presented to show the accuracy of the presented method. It is clearly demonstrated that the proposed boundary element formulation is much more efficient in comparison with domain methods.