An isogeometric approach to coupled thermomechanics in 3D via hierarchical adaptivity

In the present work, a complete numerical scheme to perform adaptive refinement and coarsening in the context of isogeometric analysis applied to thermomechanics is introduced. In particular, truncated hierarchical B-splines (THB-splines) are considered as a basis for the analysis and suitably graded isogeometric meshes are constructed to guarantee admissible configurations at each refinement and coarsening iteration. The algorithms are developed and implemented in a full three-dimensional framework and applied to solve coupled thermoelastic problems. The proposed numerical framework is verified on two relevant problems with respect to overkill solutions, obtained either with a commercial finite element software or with uniform isogeometric meshes. Different refinement and coarsening strategies are considered and compared. The obtained results demonstrate the ability of the THB-spline-based adaptive scheme to deliver robust discretizations guaranteeing a suitable trade-off between computational accuracy and number of degrees of freedom.