Thermal effects on a bridge model.

Etienne Balm`es
Ecole Centrale Paris/MSSMat and SDTools
balmes@sdtools.com

ABSTRACT
EMPTY.
1

INTRODUCTION
The objective of this model is to represent thermal effects.

EFFECT OF THERMAL PRE-STRESS ON MODESHAPES

In the presence of a thermal field generates an expansion of the material [T ] = (T T0 )[I], which can
be related to a thermal stress field using the elastic consitutive law
T = C : T = T r(T )I + 2T
The thermoelastic equilibrium is found by
Z
Z
e (qT ) : (v) =
T : (v) v

(1)

(2)

The effect of a temperature modification thus appears as an external load FT corresponding to the right
hand side of (2). The stress state associated with the deformation under a temperature loading {qT } does
not correspond to T since equation (2) is solved with appropriate boundary conditions, the temperature,
material properties and thermal expansion coefficients may not be regular over the structure.
For a given prestress state e (qT )+T (T ) associated with a thermal load, one can compute the geometric
stiffness matrix
Z
K T =
ij (qT , T )uk,i vk,j
(3)

and the modes of the heated structure are now given by



K + KT j2 M {j } = {0}

(4)

Assuming that thermal loads induce small mechanical perturbations, it clearly appears that qT , (qT )
and KT are a linear function of the thermal fieldP
T (x). If the thermal field itself is described as a linear
combination of constant thermal fields {T (x)} = i {Ti (x)}pi , the effect of temperature on the stiffness
matrix matrix can be written as
X
[K(pi )] = [K(T0 )] +
pi [KT i ]
(5)
i

The effect of temperature on modeshapes thus takes the form of a classical parametric eigenvalue problem
described by a linear combination of constant matrices. Methods to approximate such problems are discussed
in Refs. [1, 2, 3] .
To generate a small size parametric model, one retains a multi-model strategy [2] by computing target
modes at the reference temperature and with a unit thermal load. The model is then reduced on the basis
[T ] = [1:N M (T0 ) 1:N M (T0 + 1 Ti )]orth

(6)

where the orth refers to the fact that a full orthonormalization procedure is performed to generate indepent
mass orthonormal and stiffness orthogonal vectors [3] .

The resulting reduced model is thus characterized by an identity mass T T M T = I, a diagonal nominal
stiffness T T K(T0 )T , and non diagonal thermal coupling matrices TTT T . Inputs and outputs at arbitrary
i
positions can easily be generated using the projection of input/output shape functions
{y}N S = [c]N SN {q}N = [c]N SN [T ]N N R {qr }N R
3

(7)

SAMPLE APPLICATION
One considers a simplified bridge model with a deck that is 3 meter high,6.6 to 10 m wide shown in
figure ??. The 60 m span is modeled using 9600 volume elements and 13668 nodes. Material properties used
are E = 40GP a, nu = .17, = 2200kg/m3 , T = 1.2105 (o C)1 , T 0 = 20o C.
xxx uniform temperature elevation xxx
The single simplified thermal field is taken to be a linear variation of the temperature with the vertical
position from 40o C on the deck to 15o C at the bottom.
Computations are performed in the SDT environment [4] using recent developements of OpenFEM to
account for geometric non-linearities and prestress effects in the hexa8b volume element family.
The script associated with the article is available at www.sdtools.com/support/sdtdemos/bridge with thermal.m
The resulting reduced model at ftp.sdtools.com/contrib/bridge with thermal.mat

Figure 1: Linear thermal field on the bridge model.

Channel 1, 39

10

Amplitude (m/N)

10

10

10

10

11

10

12

10

10

15
Frequency (Hz)

20

25

30

Figure 2: Effect from the temperature transition on a transfer function from the edge of the bridge.

Figure 3: Linear thermal field on the bridge model.

4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work was done with partial funding from ACI Constructif.
REFERENCES
[1] Balmes, E., Parametric families of reduced finite element models. Theory and applications, Mechanical
Systems and Signal Processing, Vol. 10, No. 4, pp. 381394, 1996.
[2] Balmes, E., Uncertainty propagation in experimental modal analysis, IMAC, Dearborn, 2004.

[3] Bobillot, A., Methodes de reduction pour le recalage. Application au cas dAriane 5, Ph.D. thesis, Ecole
Centrale Paris, 2002.
[4] Balmes, E. and Lecl`
ere, J., Structural Dynamics Toolbox 5.1 (for use with MATLAB), SDTools, Paris,
France, www.sdtools.com, October 2003.