Solitary Waves for the Assessment of Thermal Stress and Neutral Temperature in Slender Structures

Slender columns and continuous welded rails subjected to compressive stress are common in many civil structures. The rapid in-situ measurement of this stress may be of interest to prevent structural anomalies such as buckling. In this article, the authors describe the coupling mechanism between highly nonlinear solitary waves (HNSWs) propagating along an L-shaped granular system and a beam in contact with the granular medium. The aim is the evaluation of HNSWs as a tool to measure stress in thermally loaded structures and to estimate the neutral temperature, i.e. the temperature at which this stress is null. The authors investigated numerically and experimentally one chain of spherical particles in contact with a prismatic beam subjected to thermal stress. The effect of the beam’s temperature on certain features of the solitary waves is investigated. In the future, the findings presented in this article may be used to develop a novel nondestructive evaluation tool for the computation of the neutral temperature and the quantification of stress.