In the present paper, a general analytical solution is proposed for anisotropic heat conduction through truncated composite spherical shells. The solution is so important in designing the spherical vessels which are usually used to store the CNG, LNG, LPG and other petroleum condensates. Herein, it is supposed that the fiber angle of composite laminate is in range of zero to 90 degrees. Heat convection with ambient flow, an external heat radiation, and a possible internal heat generation are modeled within the heat transfer equation. The exact solution is derived using the complex finite Fourier transform method. The particular solution of transferred equation is found based on the Green’s function and Sturm-Liouville theories. Finally, an inverse integral transformation is applied to form the final analytical solution in physical space. Defining four materials differing in the value of conductivity coefficient in fiber direction, the effects of used composite material and fiber angle on temperature distribution of the spherical shell are investigated in detail.

As an essential foundation for the associated thermoelasticity analysis in the boundary element method (BEM), this article proposes an expedient, yet powerful, approach to analyze the heat conduction in multiply jointed anisotropic media with bonding defects/interface cracks. The direct domain mapping technique (DDM) is applied to treat a domain consisting of dissimilar anisotropic sub-regions in the potential theory of BEM. The heat transfer across a crack is modeled with a gap conductance equation specially formulated for the BEM analysis. Two numerical examples are provided as illustrations of the validity and the applicability of this proposed scheme.