application target = one surface, or one body, or...
The fact is: OK, to have thermal expansion there must be a DELTA-Temperature. But this DELTA can be constant over the, say, surface, or not (=be dependent on the spatial coordinate).
I mean:
If the T is constant over the surface, it will be
T=f(x;y)=const
This can obviously be handled by WB. In this case, if T.ne.Tref, there is thermal expansion but not necessarily thermal stress (it depends on the restraints).
If the T is a gradient in the x direction, it will be:
T=f(x;y)=a*x+b
Let's generalize to an arbitrary T distrib (polynomial in this case):
T=f(x;y)=a*x^2+b*y^2+c*xy+d*x+e*y+f
For these cases, my collegues said that WB can not be used (that's why they shift to Clasical). Are we missing something?
You may note that this has nothing to do with time-dependency.
Discretization:
of course, when you have T=f(x;y), you can slice the surface in the x and y directions with sufficiently small pitch in order for you to consider T=const over the slice. The error with respect to the continuous distrib function can be very easily calculated.