Boundary element analysis of nonlinear transient heat conduction problems (Q1820040)

This paper is concerned with a boundary element formulation and its numerical implementation for the nonlinear transient heat conduction problems with temperature-dependent material properties. By using the Kirchhoff transformation for the material properties a set of pseudo- linear integral equations is obtained in space and time for the fully three-dimensional nonlinear problems under consideration. The resulting boundary integral equations are solved by means of the usual boundary element method. Emphasis is placed on the numerical solution procedure employing constant elements with respect to time. It is shown that in this case there is no need to evaluate the domain integrals resulting from the nonlinearity of the problem. Finally, the powerful usefulness of the proposed method is demonstrated through the numerical computation of several sample problems.