ABSTRACT
Thermoelastic stress analysis (TSA) is a full-field, noncontacting experimental stress analysis technique. TSA is noncontacting since infrared detectors are used to measure small temperature changes correlated to a stress quantity. TSA is also full-field, since either scanning mechanisms or sophisticated focal plane array infrared detectors are used to measure stresses on the full visible surface of a structure. Although TSA is a very convenient experimental system due to its full-field non-contacting nature, one of its main criticisms is that the thermoelastic signal can only be interpreted as the sum of the principal stresses for isotropic homogeneous materials. The boundary element method for Poisson equation solution has been applied to separate the individual stress components from TSA data over an arbitrarily shaped region. Solutions of the Poisson equations over arbitrarily shaped structures are attempted via the boundary element method cell integration method, the dual reciprocity method and the Monte Carlo method.
