Study on the fully coupled thermodynamic fluid–structure interaction with the material point method

The material point method (MPM) has not been evaluated in a systematic manner for the fully coupled thermodynamic fluid–structure interaction (FSI) cases. Since the constitutive models and heat transfer in solid and fluid materials are quite different, a fully coupled computational scheme is designed in this paper for simulating the FSI with the MPM, in which the governing equations for both solid and fluid material points are related to each other. A simply supported beam with a temperature difference between the top and bottom, and a cantilever beam immersed in an isothermal fluid environment are firstly considered for demonstrating the reasonable agreement with available analytical solutions. The aforementioned beam samples are then, respectively, immersed in a fluid environment involving heat transfer to study the thermal effect on the dynamic structural responses. It is illustrated that the thermal effect would induce a thermal pressure wave propagating from the high- to low-temperature ends. Furthermore, this pressure wave would affect the vibration responses of both the cantilever and simply supported beams in different ways due to its wavefront direction that is, respectively, perpendicular and parallel to the longitudinal axis of the cantilever and simply supported beams. The thermal pressure waves with the two propagating directions would also affect the buckling and flexural behaviors, respectively. The obtained results demonstrate the potential of the proposed numerical scheme in evaluating fully coupled thermodynamic FSI responses such as composites subject to extreme loadings.