Quasi-static diffusion model of complex heat transfer with reflection and refraction conditions (Q2247721)

The authors consider the parabolic-elliptic problem \(\sigma \frac{\partial \theta }{\partial t}-a\Delta \theta +b(\theta ^{3}\left\vert \theta \right\vert -\varphi )=0\), \(-\alpha \Delta \varphi +\beta (\varphi -\theta ^{3}\left\vert \theta \right\vert )=0\), posed in a bounded domain \(G\subset \mathbb{R}^{3}\) obtained as the union of a finite number of disjoint subdomains \(G_{i}\), the domain \(G_{1}\) containing the other ones. Here \( \theta \) means the normalized temperature, \(\varphi \) the normalized radiation intensity averaged over all directions, \(a\),\(b\),\(\alpha \),\(\beta \) and \(\sigma \) are positive parameters associated with the radiation and thermophysical properties of the media. On the external boundary \(\partial G\) the boundary conditions \(a\partial _{n}\theta +c(\theta -\theta _{b})=0\), \( -\alpha \partial _{n}\varphi +\gamma (\varphi -\theta _{b}^{4})=0\) are imposed, where \(\theta _{b}\) is the normalized boundary temperature. On the internal boundaries \(\partial G_{i}\), the boundary conditions \(\theta _{1}=\theta _{i}\), \(a_{1}\partial _{n}\theta _{1}=a_{i}\partial _{n}\theta _{i}\), \(n_{1}^{2}\alpha _{1}\partial _{n}\varphi _{1}=n_{i}^{2}\alpha _{i}\partial _{n}\varphi _{i}\), \(h_{i}(\varphi _{i}-\varphi _{1})=\alpha _{1}\partial _{n}\varphi _{1}\) are imposed. \(\theta \) starts from an initial condition \(\theta _{0}\). The authors propose a variational formulation associated with this problem which involves appropriate functional spaces and functionals and they define the notion of weak solution to this problem. Under some hypotheses on the data, the authors prove the existence of a unique weak solution to this problem. For the proof, they use standard functional analysis tools. In the last part of their paper, the authors propose a numerical resolution of this problem using the finite element package FreeFEM++. They here consider the 3D unbounded domain \( \{(x_{1},x_{2}):0<x_{1},x_{2}<25\}\times (-\infty ,\infty )\) and they discuss properties of the solution that they illustrate with figures.