Dynamic thermoelastic effects for half-planes and half-spaces with nearly-planar surfaces (Q1371449)

The authors study the effect of nonplanarity on the dynamic surface temperature changes induced by plane-strain, and three-dimensional problems on the nearly-planar surfaces of coupled thermoelastic half-planes and half-spaces corresponding to surface heat fluxes. The analysis uses the nearly-planar nature of the surfaces to present the surface temperature change as an expansion in a dimensionless surface contour amplitude parameter. The first term in the expansion is the temperature change that arises on an ideal (planar) surface, while the second term represents the first-order contribution due to nonplanarity. The two terms are compared for a half-plane loaded either by a point source (line source in the out-of-plane direction) heat flux or by a heat flux imposed over an asymmetrically expanding surface strip, and for a half-space loaded by a heat flux imposed uniformly over a fixed finite area. This comparison shows that non-planarity gives rise to surface temperature changes in areas beyond those predicted for large times by an ideal surface analysis, and that the changes associated with nonplanarity may in some instances be more significant than those for the ideal surface. The solutions are either analytic, or integrals of analytic expressions. Despite their large-time nature, these forms are robust because the characteristic thermoelastic time used for scaling is of \(O(10^{-8})\mu s.\) The contour functions for the surfaces are general -- they have only to lie in \(C^2\) -- and have amplitudes that are small enough, so the differences between surface lengths/areas and their planar projections are negligible. Thus the surface quantities can be written as Taylor series expansions about the projection plane.