Boundary Tracing for Laplace's Equation with Conformal Mapping

Abstract

The conformal mapping technique has long been used to obtain exact solutions to Laplace's equation in two-dimensional domains with awkward geometries. However, a major limitation of the technique is that it is only directly compatible with Dirichlet and zero-flux Neumann boundary conditions. It would be useful to have a means of adapting the technique to handle more general boundary conditions, for example, Robin or nonlinear flux conditions. Boundary tracing is an unconventional method for tackling boundary value problems with generic flux boundary conditions, where one takes a known solution to the field equation and seeks new boundaries satisfying the prescribed boundary condition. In this paper, we adapt boundary tracing for compatibility with conformal mapping to produce a new prescription for studying Laplace's equation coupled with general flux boundary conditions. We illustrate the procedure via two simple examples involving heat transfer. In both cases, we demonstrate how to construct infinite families of nontrivial domains in which the solution to the chosen flux boundary value problem is exactly equal to a selected harmonic function.