In order to respond to the demand of accurate miniature inertial navigation systems, ONERA has been working on the design of a vibrating beam accelerometer called the Vibrating Inertial Accelerometer (VIA). The accuracy of the VIA is directly related to the thermoelastic quality factor of its sensitive element, which is a beam made of quartz. In this work, thermopiezoelectric finite element ana...

Intriguing seismic observations have been made for the bottom 400 km of Earth's mantle (the D'' region) over the past few decades, yet the origin of these seismic structures has not been well understood. Recent theoretical calculations have predicted many unusual changes in physical properties across the postperovskite transition, perovskite (Pv) --> postperovskite (PPv), that may provide expla...

When heat is conducted across an interface between two different materials, the interaction between thermoelastic distortion and thermal contact resistance can cause the system to be unstable. This paper investigates the influence of material properties on the stability criterion for an interface between two half planes. It is found that most material combinations exhibit one or other of two ki...

Because of the wide variety of composite materials that are available, and the expense involved in testing to measure properties for design purposes (such as their damage tolerance), there is a need to develop predictive methods that can readily be utilised on desk-top computers. It is inevitable that such methods will be based on analytical rather than finite element techniques. A review is gi...

The reflection and transmission of thermoelastic plane waves at an imperfect boundary of two dissimilar fibre-reinforced transversely isotropic thermoelastic solid half-spaces under hydrostatic initial stress has been investigated. The appropriate boundary conditions are applied at the interface to obtain the reflection and transmission coefficients of various reflected and transmitted waves wi...

Thermoelastic expansion due to frictional heating causes significant changes in contact pressure and temperature in energy dissipation systems uch as brakes and clutches. Finite element analysis of such systems tends to be extremely computer-intensive. We here present an alternative mplementation of the transient problem, based on the expression of the temperature and stress fields as modal exp...

Detection of gravitational waves from astrophysical sources remains one of the most challenging problems faced by experimental physicists. A significant limit to the sensitivity of future long-baseline interferometric gravitational wave detectors is thermal displacement noise of the test mass mirrors and their suspensions. Suspension thermal noise results from mechanical dissipation in the fuse...