Efficient computer implementation of coupled hydro-thermo-mechanical analysis Original Research Article

Hydro-thermo-mechanical analysis of reactor vessels based on the finite element method is a very demanding task due to its complexity as well as the large number of unknowns. This contribution deals with efficient computer implementation of the coupled analysis and attention is also devoted to domain decomposition methods which enable utilisation of parallel computers. The parallel processing leads to very good speedup and it also enables to solve significantly large problems in acceptable time. The proposed strategy is demonstrated on a coupled analysis of an existing reactor vessel.