We carry out a revised analysis of the concentration of thermal stresses in a shallow spherical shell with a small foreign inclusion. We show that near the interface of the materials the stressed state has a sharply expressed three-dimensional character; thus the stresses differ significantly (both qualitatively and quantitatively) from the shells predicted by the standard thearies_.The study of thermal stresses in shells with a foreign inclusion is of great value in applications, in particular in connection with the manufacture, testing, and use of electrovacuum devices. A bibliography devoted to this problem can be found in the monograph of Podstrigach, Kolyano, and Semerak [2]. However, nearly all the results known in the literature on this problem were obtained by applying shell theories that do not provide a sufficiently complete description of the effects connected with the three-dimensional nature of the stressed state in the contact zones.At the same time the study of the thermally stressed state of plates with foreign inclusions carried out using the revised theory of plates [6] has shown [3,7] that in the contact zones the stressed state differs from that predicted by the standard theories of plates. These effects have a boundary-layer character and arise at a distance from the contact surface commensurate with the thickness of the plate. The presence of such effects caused by the foreign matter, should be observed also in thin-walled shell structures.In the present paper we conduct a revised analysis of the thermally stressed state in the contact zone of a shell as follows. From the theory of shells we determine the thermally stressed state of a shell containing a round inclusion. On the basis of a parametric analysis of this solution we identify a contact zone of the shell that can be replaced by an annular plate without any significant distortion of the contact stresses. Then, using the revised theory of plates, which makes it possible to determine all the components of the stress tensor [6], we determine the stressed state of a circular plate with a foreign inclusion; the boundary conditions for this problem are formulated by applying the solution obtained from shell theory.Consider a uniformly heated shallow spherical shell containing a small foreign inclusion of radius r0. The thickness of the shell and the inclusion are the same and equal to 2h. For the shallow spherical shell we take the initial data to be the following system of key equations [4]:Here ~ is the stress function, w is the deflection, T is the temperature, R is the radius of the shell, E is the Young's modulus, v is the Poisson coefficient, ~ is the temperature coefficient of linear expansion, and A is the Laplacian. We introduce the following notation for the Kelvin functions [5]:~2i_1(X) = f2i(X), ~2i(X)=--f2i_l(Z), i=l,2.Then the general solution of the system (1) can be represented as