Thermo-mechanical coupling in beam-to-beam contact

Contact including coupling between mechanical and thermal fields constitutes a complicated problem because the mutual influences between displacements or strains and temperature are manifested in many different ways. A detailed description of various issues related to the thermo-mechanical coupling in contact can be found in the monograph by [6]. In this paper a formulation of a beam-to-beam contact element for the coupled thermo-mechanical field is presented. Contact surfaces are considered ideally smooth, so that the heat transfer due to radiation and convection in the micro cavities is neglected. In the physi-cal model of the beam material, only the linear thermal expansion is included and all the physical parameters are treated as independent of time and temperature.