• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.229-235
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• 2016

In this paper, a methodology, which is able to predict the thermal stresses accurately yet efficiently, is presented for beam structures via Saint-Venant's principle. In general, higher-order beam theories have been known to be effective for the prediction of thermal stresses. In contrast to this, we propose the method to predict the thermal stresses of beam structures by post-processing the classical beam theory via Saint-Venant's principle. The approach includes an out-of-plane warping displacement to account for the through-the-thickness thermal deformation. With this, one can accurately recover the thermal stresses as compared to the elasticity solutions. In fact, they are identical for the beams made of isotropic materials. The effect of out-of-plane warping is also investigated, it turns out that the effect is negligible in mechanical stress analysis but not in thermal stress analysis.