A novel primal-mixed finite element approach for heat transfer in solids (Q1015554)

The authors describe a primal-mixed finite element approach in order to compute in a simultaneous way the temperature and the heat flux, when considering a parabolic equation. Let \(\Omega \) be a bounded domain of the euclidean space \(E^{n}\), \(n=1,2,3\). Its smooth boundary \(\partial \Omega \) is decomposed in four parts \(\partial \Omega =\partial \Omega _{T}\cup \partial \Omega _{q}\cup \partial \Omega _{c}\cup \partial \Omega _{r}\). The parabolic problem is written as \(\rho c\frac{\partial T}{\partial t}+ \text{div}\mathbf{q}-f=0\), \(\mathbf{q}=-\mathbf{k}\nabla T\), in \(\Omega \). Dirichlet or Neumann or Robin or even radiative boundary conditions are imposed on the different parts of \(\partial \Omega \). The authors first write the weak formulation of this problem as: find \(\{T,\mathbf{q}\}\in H^{1}(\Omega )\times L_{2}(\Omega )\) such that \(T\mid _{\partial \Omega _{T}} \) is prescribed and \(\int_{\Omega }\mathbf{qk}^{-1}\mathbf{Q}d\Omega +\int_{\Omega }\nabla T\cdot \mathbf{Q}d\Omega =\int_{\Omega }\rho c\frac{ \partial T}{\partial t}\theta d\Omega +\int_{\Omega }\mathbf{q}\cdot \nabla \theta d\Omega -\int_{\Omega }\theta fd\Omega -\int_{\partial \Omega _{q}}\theta hd\partial \Omega -\int_{\partial \Omega _{c}}q_{c}\theta d\partial \Omega \), for every \(\{\theta ,\mathbf{Q}\}\in H^{1}(\Omega )\times L_{2}(\Omega )\), such that \(\theta \mid _{\partial \Omega _{T}}=0\). A backward Euler scheme is used for the time discretization \(\rho c\frac{ \partial T}{\partial t}\mid _{n}\approx \rho c\frac{^{n}T-^{n-1}T}{\Delta t}\). Using a FEM approximation, the authors obtain a matrix approximation of this weak formulation. The authors describe the situation where hexahedral continuous element families are used. They then check the necessary and sufficient conditions of the convergence for this method. They succesively examine low-order, high-order and inf-sup numerical tests. The last part of the paper illustrates the results obtained when applying this numerical method to several concrete examples, which prove its reliability.