Variational formulation of the boundary element method in transient heat conduction (Q803754)

This paper presents an integral equation formulation, which is proved to exhibit suitably defined symmetries in space and in time, to treat the transient heat conduction analysis. The boundary element solution is shown to be characterized by a boundary variational theorem. The subsequent discretization leads to a linear equation system, whose coefficient matrix turns out to be symmetric and is generated by double- integrations. Computational aspects are only briefly discussed.