Isogeometric boundary element method for steady-state heat transfer with concentrated/surface heat sources

Abstract

An isogeometric boundary element method (IGABEM) is proposed for solving the steady-state heat transfer problems with concentrated/surface internal heat sources. The isogeometric boundary element method (IGABEM) possesses the advantages of both the isogeometric analysis (IGA) and the boundary element method (BEM), the non-uniform rational B-spline (NURBS) basis functions used in the (computer-aided design) CAD system are flexible and stable in dealing with irregular boundaries, due to which the NURBS basis functions are applied to exactly reconstruct the boundary geometry of the analysis domain, and the physical variables are also approximated by the NURBS as the standard IGA does. Dirac delta function is introduced in the present IGABEM for dealing with the concentrated point heat sources, and a local coordinate system is proposed for the domain integration over line heat source based on the NURBS basis functions. As to the domain integrals caused by the surface heat sources, the radial integration method (RIM) is used to transform the domain integrals to boundary ones without any internal cells for the original version of IGABEM. Several numerical examples involving Dirichlet, Neumann and Robin boundary conditions are analyzed, and circular region with point/line heat source(sources), global and local surface heat sources within multiply connected regions are also considered. Verification of the proposed method has been gained by comparing the present results with those obtained by several other researchers, and solutions achieved by analytical expression together with the fine-meshed ANSYS model are also utilized for the purpose of comparison. Meanwhile, the computational efficiency and convergence of the present method is evaluated by comparing the IGABEM with the finite element method (FEM) as well as the traditional BEM. Good performance of the IGABEM is observed. Finally, heat transfer within a simplified printed circuit board (PCB) with both concentrated (line and point) and surface heat generations is studied, the temperature distribution is achieved, which verifies the applicability of the proposed technoque in practical engineering.