ANISOTROPIC HEAT CONDUCTION INVOLVING INTERNAL ARBITRARY VOLUME HEAT GENERATION RATE

Abstract

In this article, the problem of anisotropic heat conduction involving internal arbitrary volume heat generation rate is solved by the boundary element method. In the direct formulation for the boundary element analysis ofheat conduction problems, the presence of a volume heat source will give rise to a domain integral, which conventionally demands internal cell discretisation throughout the whole domain. However, this domain discretisation will destroy the distinctive feature of the boundary element method as a boundary solution technique. In this paper, the multiple reciprocity method in conjunction with the standard characteristics method is employed to exactly transform the domain integral into a series of boundary ones. The distribution of heat generation in a volume heat source could be in an arbitrary form of a continuous function. After the anisotropic heat conduction problem is iteratively solved in the mapped plane, the obtained numerical solution is thereafter interpolated and transformed back to the one in the physical domain.