Predicting the behavior of almost brittle materials in face of material degradation up to fracture is a topic that can be addressed with the use of continuous damage mechanics. Thermal effects, in addition to mechanical ones, may contribute significantly to the structural and material response. In this sense, the coupling between the different branches of physics takes into account the free conversion of energy in its various forms. The present work is about the thermal-mechanical coupling in in quasi-brittle materials, in which the isotropic damage model and the damage criteria are addressed, as well as the laws of evolution of thermal and mechanical damage. In addition, aspects inherent to thermodynamics and heat transfer are explained. The thermal effect in the structural analysis begins with an investigation of the requirements for temperature variations to produce thermal stresses and follows with a study of the effect of temperature on the material, which affects the elasticity module, the tensile and compression strength, in addition to the fracture energy. However, finite element modeling of stiffness degradation due to the damage process leads to problems of dependence on the mesh, which requires the use of regularization techniques, as addressed in this work. Numerical examples demonstrate the effects of thermo-mechanical coupling in the assessment of structure integrity.