Thermo-mechanical analysis of rotating disks with non-uniform thickness and material properties

Theoretical and numerical analyses of rotating disks with non-uniform thickness and material properties subjected to thermo-mechanical loadings have been carried out by variable material properties (VMP), Runge–Kutta's (RK) and finite element (FE) methods. The material is assumed to be elastic-linear hardening. A power form function is used to describe the temperature gradient with the higher temperature at outer surface. Von-Mises theory has been used as failure criterion. The effects of geometry, material and thermal loading parameters as well as boundary conditions on radial, hoop and equivalent stress distributions which have not been studied in much detail in previous works have been investigated. Good agreement between the results obtained from the three proposed methods is observed. It has also been observed a coarser mesh can be used in RK. Compared with previous works published by authors using variable iteration method, Adomian method, and Homotopy analysis method, VMP was found to be much easier for computer implementation and required less CPU time and computer memory and hardware.