Nonlinear dynamic thermal-mechanical behaviors of framed structures under temperature variations

•A novel fiber-based method for dynamic thermo-mechanical analysis of frames is proposed.•Nonlinear temperature gradients in both vertical and horizontal directions are considered.•Seismic responses of buildings are affected by ambient temperature.•Relation between the frequency of cable-stayed bridges and temperature is nonlinear.•The proposed method provided solutions with excellent computational efficiency. An abnormal change in dynamic characteristics is considered an indicator of structural damage and can help the optimal design of structures suffering from dynamic loads, but these characteristics are also affected by ambient temperature. Therefore, a novel advanced computational method based on the fiber-based approach is proposed for the first time to predict the nonlinear dynamic behaviors of frames under environmental temperature changes with linear and nonlinear profiles by using Fortran programming language. The cross-section will be divided into a matrix of fibers, and by assigning the different temperatures to each fiber, all linear and nonlinear temperature gradients in both vertical and horizontal directions will be operated. The material nonlinearity is traced by the distributed plasticity model using the same mesh as the fiber-based approach whereas the effects of geometric nonlinearity due to member curvature and member chord rotation are considered by using the stability functions and a geometric matrix, respectively. A sequential nonlinear thermal incremental-iterative solution scheme based on the Newton-Raphson algorithm and Newmark-β method is also developed to address the nonlinear dynamic problems due to temperature variations. The accuracy and computational performance of the proposed method are validated by comparing the obtained results with those from experiments and the Abaqus. Results obtained show that the proposed method is exact for the nonlinear inelastic dynamic thermo-mechanical analysis of framed structures. It would offer a tool for thermal-structural design practice instead of using time and cost-consuming commercial software. [Display omitted]