Analytically-integrated radial integration PBEM for solving three-dimensional steady heat conduction problems

Abstract

Recently, a polygonal boundary element method (PBEM) has been developed for solving heat conduction problems. In the PBEM, the radial integration method (RIM) is employed to shift the domain and surface integrals in the boundary-domain integral equation into equivalent line integrals, and all the radial integrals are computed by Gaussian quadrature, which may obtain an accurate solution. However, the computation costs much. Therefore, analytical expressions of radial integrals are derived in this paper, concerning four kinds of varying thermal conductivities and two kinds of heat generation functions, aiming at improving the efficiency. Then all the radial integrals in the boundary-domain integral equation can be analytically calculated. Three examples are employed to examine the analytically-integrated PBEM for solving steady heat conduction problems. The results show that the proposed method is accurate, and it is more efficient than traditional PBEM.