A note on the use of the isotherm migration method (Q1182671)

In this note a modification of the standard isotherm migration method for solving Stefan problems, i.e. heat conduction problems with moving boundaries, is proposed. Considered are the variable Dirichlet problem, in which the boundary conditions are a function of time, the Neumann problem, in which a constant flux into or out of the material is specified, and Robin's radiation problem, in which radiation into or out of the material from or into a medium is considered. The modification mainly consists in introducing a new dependent variable, in which the local temperature is normalized with the temperature on the boundary. The advantage of this normalization is that the dependent variable is always of order unity. Thereby explicit and implicit finite- difference formulations are expected to yield exact results, even when the initial temperature distributions are adverse.