Stress-driven modeling of nonlocal thermoelastic behavior of nanobeams

A consistent stress-driven nonlocal integral model for nonisothermal structural analysis of elastic nano- and microbeams is proposed. Most nonlocal models of literature are strain-driven and it was shown that such approaches can lead toward a number of difficulties. Following recent contributions within the isothermal setting, the developed model abandons the classical strain-driven methodology in favour of the modern stress-driven elasticity theory by G. Romano and R. Barretta. This effectively circumvents issues associated with strain-driven formulations. The new thermoelastic nonlocal integral model is proven to be equivalent to an adequate set of differential equations, accompanied by higher-order constitutive boundary conditions, when the special Helmholtz averaging kernel is adopted in the convolution. The example section provides several applications, thus enabling insight into performance of the formulation. Exact nonlocal solutions are established, detecting also new benchmarks for thermoelastic numerical analyses.