Generalized thermoelastic waves in cylinders due to localized heating

This paper presents a theoretical study of propagation of thermoelastic waves generated by concentrated heating of the outer surface of circular cylindrical shells.The generalized thermoelastic theory proposed by Lord and Shulman is used to model the response of a circular cylindrical shell to a pulsed laser focused on the surface of the cylinder.Guided wave modes in the cylinder are obtained by a semianalytical finite element method.Dynamic response is constructed numerically by superposition of guided wave modes.In this method, the cylinder is discretized in the radial direction into several coaxial circular cylinders (subcylinders) and the radial dependence of the displacement and temperature in each subcylinder is approximated by quadratic interpolation polynomials.Numerical results for the variation through the thickness of various physical quantities of interest at a location away from the source are presented for a silicon nitride (Si 3 N 4 ) tube for illustration purposes.The frequency dependence of the response quantities is discussed and attention is focused on convergence and accuracy of the computed results.