Meshless local B-spline collocation method for heterogeneous heat conduction problems

Abstract

Several numerical issues still pertain in the modeling of heterogeneous heat conduction, particularly from the viewpoints of material discontinuity and its handling and the presence of heat source. In this paper, a meshless local B-spline collocation method is presented for unsteady heat conduction problems of heterogeneous media. Unknown field variables are approximated by using B-spline basis functions within overlapped compact domains covering the geometry of materials. The present method is a truly meshless approach. The proposed approach is mainly coming with the following advantage that it is straightforward in dealing with discontinuity across the interface of heterogeneous materials. Treatment of discontinuity by using non-crossing interface compact domains allows material discontinuity to be handled geometrically without enforcing additional term/function at the interface. Several heat conduction problems in 2D and 3D heterogeneous media with arbitrary discontinuity shapes are considered. Attention is given for heterogeneous heat conduction problem accompanied by the presence of crack as well. The analysis is then completed by simulating effect of heat generation, in particular which produces high temperature rise inside a heterogeneous structure/component. Simulation results show that the proposed method is a simple and accurate numerical technique for solving unsteady heat conduction problems of heterogeneous media.