Green element calculations of nonlinear heat conduction with a time-dependent fundamental solution (Q597579)

The paper presents the integral formulation for solution of nonlinear 2D heat conduction problems with temperature-dependent conductivity by using the fundamental solution of the diffusive operator. The analysed domain is discretized into polygonal elements and the time variable into time steps with linear interpolation within each element and time step. The problem is linearized by taking the thermal diffusivity at the centroid of each domain element and the previous time steps. The time integration is carried out analytically yielding also the exponential integral function which is singular for small values of the ratio indicative element size/length of the time step. The value of the dimensionless parameter is optimized in numerical examples. The Newton-Raphson algorithm is incorporated into the formulation, and the accuracy and efficiency of the present formulation is compared with that using the fundamental solution for the Laplace operator.