Numerical solution of thermal convection problems using the multidomain boundary element method

Abstract

AbstractThe multidomain dual reciprocity method (MD‐DRM) has been effectively applied to the solution of two‐dimensional thermal convection problems where the momentum and energy equations govern the motion of a viscous fluid. In the proposed boundary integral method the domain integrals are transformed into equivalent boundary integrals by the dual reciprocity approach applied in a subdomain basis. On each subregion or domain element the integral representation formulas for the velocity and temperature are applied and discretised using linear continuous boundary elements, and the equations from adjacent subregions are matched by additional continuity conditions. Some examples showing the accuracy, the efficiency and flexibility of the proposed method are presented. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq 18: 469–489, 2002; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/num.10016