Boundary element analysis of nonlinear transient heat conduction problems involving non-homogenous and nonlinear heat sources using time-dependent fundamental solutions

A new method for the boundary element analysis of unsteady heat conduction problems involving non-homogenous and/or temperature dependent heat sources by the time-dependent fundamental solution is presented. Nonlinear terms are converted to a fictitious heat source and implemented in the present formulation. The domain integrals are efficiently treated by the recently introduced Cartesian transformation method. Similar to the dual reciprocity method, some internal grid points are considered for the treatment of the domain integrals. In the present method, unlike the dual reciprocity method, there is no need to find particular solution for the shape functions in the interpolation computations and the form of the shape functions can be arbitrary and sufficiently complicated. In the present method, at each time step the temperature at boundary nodes and some internal grid points is computed and used as pseudo-initial values for the next time step. Most of the generated matrices are constant at all time steps and computations can be carried out fast. An example with different forms of heat sources is presented to show the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed method.