SAINT-VENANT'S PRINCIPLE FOR A MICROPERIODIC COMPOSITE THERMOELASTIC SEMISPACE: THE DYNAMICAL REFINED AVERAGE THEORY.

A Saint-Venant's principle associated with a one-dimensional dynamic coupled thermoelastic effective modulus theory (EMT) for a microperiodic layered semispace was presented in J. Thermal Stresses, vol. 23, pp. 1–14, 2000. It was shown there that a thermoelastic energy associated with a solution to an initial boundary value problem of the theory decays exponentially as a distance x from the thermomechanical load region goes to infinity and that its decay length depends on the time t, an effective velocity <c1*>, an effective time unit <T*> , and an effective thermoelastic coupling parameter <ε*>. In the present article the Saint-Venant's principle is extended to include a refined averaged theory (RAT) for a microperiodic layered thermoelastic semispace in which a microstructural length is taken into account (see [IFTR Report #25, pp. 1–158, 1995]). It is shown that for such an extended theory, a similar exponential decay estimate for a thermoelastic energy holds true. In the refined estimate the thermoelastic energy depends on a number of microstructural parameters while its decay length is independent of these parameters; and the decay length for small (large) times is comparable to that of a pure thermal (elastic) energy for a rigid (elastic) semispace for every time t > 0 . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]