Evaluation of a radial basis function node refinement algorithm applied to bioheat transfer modeling

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Many bioheat transfer problems involve linear/non-linear equations with non-linear or time-dependent boundary conditions. For heat transfer problems, the presence of time and space-dependent functions under Neumann and Mixed type boundary conditions characterize trivial applications in bioengineering, such as thermotherapies, laser surgeries, and burn studies. This greatly increases the complexity of the numerical solution in several problems, requiring fast and accurate numerical solutions. This paper has a main objective evaluate an adaptive mesh refinement radial basis function method strategy for the classical Penne's bioheat transfer modeling. Our numerical results had errors of ~0.1% compared to analytical solutions. Thus, the proposed methodology is accurate and has a low computational cost. For step function heating, two RBF shape parameters were applied, again achieving excellent results. The distributions of the nodes in the solution domain show that the primary source of error in the numerical solutions came from the boundary conditions. This finding should arouse the interest of engineers and scientists in the development of new strategies for problems involving boundary conditions with periodic functions.