Least squares finite element formulation in the time domain for the dual reciprocity boundary element method in heat conduction (Q2366886)

The authors present least squares finite element formulation in time domain for the dual reciprocity boundary element method in heat conduction as an alternative to two-point finite difference or weighted residual schemes which have been used in literature to integrate the system of ordinary differential equations in time arising from spatial boundary element discretisation. The formulation obtains the desired recurrence relations via a least square method in the context of one linear time element representing the entire time domain. Numerical results concerning the stability and convergence aspects of the proposed scheme have been presented for four representative problems and compared with those obtained using two-point finite difference (or weighted residual) schemes: the fully implicit, the Galerkin and Crank- Nicolson schemes. The least squares scheme gives stable and higher than first order accurate results with linear time elements for all problems considered herein. Results with this scheme indicate nearly quadratic rate of convergence for all problems considered and exponential convergence for problems involving Dirichlet boundary conditions. Further the proposed least squares scheme gives, in general, the most accurate results at about the same computational cost as the weighted residual schemes and obtains every accurate large time solutions. The results obtained also show that Crank-Nicolson scheme gives accurate results only for the problems free from Dirichlet boundary conditions, whereas Galerkin scheme gives better results than the fully implicit scheme for all problems considered herein. The formulations is new and is of great interest to people working on application of finite element methods.