Thermal stresses owing to convective heating at surface

Thermal stress wave generation and propagation inside solid substrates due to convective heating conditions at the surface find wide application in industry for the surface hardening and non-destructive testing of solid substrates. In the present study, analytical solutions for the temperature distribution and thermal stress wave generation during convective heating of a solid substrate are presented. A Laplace transformation method is used to obtain the closed form solutions. The resulting equations for temperature and thermal wave distributions are computed for a steel substrate. It is found that the thermal stress waves are compressive and the magnitude of stress increases as the Biot number increases. Moreover, the location of maximum stress moves away from the surface as the heating period progresses.