Thermal analysis of 3D composites by a new fast multipole hybrid boundary node method

Abstract

This paper applies the hybrid boundary node method (Hybrid BNM) for the thermal analysis of 3D composites. A new formulation is derived for the inclusion-based composites. In the new formulation, the unknowns of the interfaces are assembled only once in the final system equation, which can reduce nearly one half of degrees of freedom (DOFs) compared with the conventional multi-domain solver when there are lots of inclusions. A new version of the fast multipole method (FMM) is also coupled with the new formulation and the technique is applied to thermal analysis of composites with many inclusions. In the new fast multipole hybrid boundary node method (FM-HBNM), a diagonal form for translation operators is used and the method presented can be applied to the computation of more than 1,000,000 DOFs on a personal computer. Numerical examples are presented to analyze the thermal behavior of composites with many inclusions.