Description: Simultaneous temperature/electrical potential/displacement solution requires the use of coupled thermal-electrical-structural elements; pure displacement and temperature-displacement elements can be used in part of the model in a fully coupled thermal-electrical-structural analysis, but pure heat transfer elements cannot be used.

The first-order coupled thermal-electrical-structural elements in Abaqus use a constant temperature over the element to calculate thermal expansion. The second-order coupled thermal-electrical-structural elements in Abaqus use a lower-order interpolation for temperature than for displacement (parabolic variation of displacements and linear variation of temperature) to obtain a compatible variation of thermal and mechanical strain.