Numerical investigation of the nonlinear heat diffusion equation with high nonlinearity on the boundary (Q945310)

The authors consider a nonlinear heat diffusion problem where the thermal conductivity and heat capacity are temperature-dependent together with a highly nonlinear condition at one of the boundaries is imposed involving both the flux and the temperature. They apply an equivalence transformation which allows to reformulate the problem as an equation with linear diffusion for the transformed function. This gives a unique opportunity to create a nonlinear modification of the Crank-Nicolson type finite difference scheme with internal iterations that faithfully represents the energy balance for the system. The equivalence transformation allows one to treat problems with plane, cylindrical, and spherical symmetry in an unified fashion. As a featuring example, they consider two versions of the nonlinear boundary condition: energy absorption and energy input. They show that the latter leads to blow up of the solution at the boundary and identify the profile of the blowing-up solution.