Thermoelastic analysis of functionally graded solids using a staggered finite volume method

A new approach based on cell vertex finite volume method (CV-FVM) has been developed by the introduction of the staggered grid technique for thermoelastic analysis in functionally graded materials (FGMs). The 4-node quadrilateral grid and the 3-node triangular grid are employed to deal with mixed-grid problems. The performance of the developed method has been demonstrated by four numerical tests. First, the consideration of the bilinear quadrilateral grid is found to be important for the elimination of artificial numerical oscillation in the displacement field. Second, the staggered grid technique is proved (within the considered test cases) to be efficient and reliable for thermoelastic analysis in FGMs without any undesirable discontinuous distribution. Third, the present method requires small computational and memory costs compared to the method adopting graded elements or higher-order theory. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.