Fractional Pennes' bioheat equation: theoretical and numerical studies (Q2517208)

In this paper, the authors consider a modified version of the Pennes' bio-heat equation of the form \[ \frac{\partial^{\alpha} T(x,t)}{\partial t^{\alpha}} = A \frac{\partial}{\partial x}( k(x)\frac{\partial T(x,t)}{\partial x})- B T(x,t) + C, \quad 0< t < T^{*}, \quad 0< x < L, \tag{*} \] where the first-order time derivative \( \partial T(x,t)/\partial t \) in the original equation is replaced by the time-fractional derivative \( \partial^{\alpha}T(x,t)/\partial t^{\alpha} \), \( 0< \alpha <1 \). In (*), \( \partial^{\alpha}/\partial t^{\alpha} \) is the fractional Caputo derivative of an arbitrary real number \( \alpha \) \( ( 0 < \alpha < 1 ) \) which is given by \[ \frac{\partial^{\alpha}T(x,t)}{\partial t^{\alpha}}= \frac{1}{\Gamma (1-\alpha )}\int^{t}_{0}(t-s)^{-\alpha}\frac{\partial T(x,s)}{\partial s}ds. \] They assume constant heat flux at the boundaries \[ \begin{aligned} -k(x)\frac{\partial T(x,t)}{\partial x}|_{x=0}= q_{0}, \quad t>0, \\ -k(x)\frac{\partial T(x,t)}{\partial x}|_{x=L}= 0, \quad t>0, \end{aligned} \] and an initial condition \( T(x,0) = T_{a}\), \(0< x < L \). Besides the constant heat flux, they also consider periodic boundary conditions \[ -k(x)\frac{\partial T(x,t)}{\partial x}|_{x=0}= q_{0} \cos(\varpi t), \quad t>0 \] where \( \varpi \) is the heating frequency. They solve the problem numerically using an implicit finite difference scheme which is proved to be convergent and stable. The results obtained in this paper are compared with the results of the original models that use classical derivatives.