A non-local heat transport model in solids with discontinuities via Lagrangian particle method

Abstract

A new Lagrangian non-local diffusion model, designed as a meshless particle simulation method, is proposed to predict the thermal response of solids involving discontinuous. The main idea is to understand the heat transfer process of solids via a Lagrangian treatment of a particle-discretized system, which provides a more general physical representation of the heat transfer process of solids. In contrast to the traditional differential model, the proposed mathematical model is expressed via an integral form, which can easily handle the case involving discontinuities. The spatial convergence studies show that the proposed model converges to its associated non-local solution while increasing the number of particles in a fixed cut-off radius; and it can reach the local exact solution when the cut-off radius is close to zero. The numerical examples not only verify that the proposed diffusion model converges to the continuum heat conduction model, but also show the capability of its application to heat transfer problems involving discontinuities. In particular, the computational performance of the proposed non-local thermal model is also demonstrated its computational performance in the case with practical crack propagation in a two-dimensional plate. In addition, the specific comparison between the proposed method and the well-developed peridynamics approach for heat conduction problems is carefully described with rigor via mathematical proofs and numerical results. Specifically, the proposed model is shown to be a variation of the corresponding peridynamic-type thermal diffusion model. This model not only has a formulation consistent with that of peridynamics in solid mechanics but also shows a better performance in the case with sharp corners than that of the peridynamic diffusion in [1].