Search results

The purpose of this paper is to address unsteady heat conduction in two subsets of ordinary bodies. One subset consists of a large plane wall, a long cylinder and a sphere in one dimension. The other subset consists of a short cylinder and a large rectangular bar in two dimensions. The prevalent assumptions in the two subsets are: constant initial temperature, uniform surface heat flux and thermo-physical properties invariant with temperature. The engineering applications of the unsteady heat conduction deal with the determination of temperature–time histories in the two subsets using electric resistance heating, radiative heating and fire pool heating.

To this end, a novel numerical procedure named the enhanced method of discretization in time (EMDT) transforms the linear one-dimensional unsteady, heat conduction equations with non-homogeneous boundary conditions into equivalent nonlinear “quasi–steady” heat conduction equations having the time variable embedded as a time parameter. The equivalent nonlinear “quasi–steady” heat conduction equations are solved with a finite difference method.

Based on the numerical computations, it is demonstrated that the approximate temperature–time histories in the simple subset of ordinary bodies (large plane wall, long cylinder and sphere) exhibit a perfect matching over the entire time domain 0 < t < ∞ when compared against the rigorous exact temperature–time histories expressed by classical infinite series. Furthermore, using the method of superposition of solutions in the convoluted subset (short cylinder and large rectangular crossbar), the same level of agreement in the approximate temperature–time histories in the simple subset of ordinary bodies is evident.

The performance of the proposed EMDT coupled with a finite difference method is exhaustively assessed in the solution of the unsteady, one-dimensional heat conduction equations with prescribed surface heat flux for: a subset of one-dimensional bodies (plane wall, long cylinder and spheres) and a subset of two-dimensional bodies (short cylinder and large rectangular bar).

The purpose of this study is to address one-dimensional, unsteady heat conduction in a large plane wall exchanging heat convection with a nearby fluid under “small time” conditions.

The Transversal Method of Lines (TMOL) was used to reformulate the unsteady, one-dimensional heat conduction equation in the space coordinate and time into a transformed “quasi-steady”, one-dimensional heat conduction equation in the space coordinate housing the time as an embedded parameter. The resulting ordinary differential equation of second order with heat convection boundary conditions is solved analytically with the method of undetermined coefficients.

Semi-analytical TMOL dimensionless temperature profiles of compact form with/without regressed terms are obtained for the whole spectrum of Biot number (0 < Bi < ∞) in the “small time” sub-domain. In addition, a new “large time” sub-domain is redefined, that is, setting a smaller critical dimensionless time or critical Fourier number τ_cr = 0.18.

The computed dimensionless center, surface and mean temperature profiles in the large plane wall accounting for all Biot number (0 < Bi < ∞) in the “small time” sub-domain τ < τ_cr = 0.18 exhibit excellent quality while carrying reasonable relative errors for engineering applications. The exemplary level of accuracy indicates that the traditional evaluation of the center, surface and mean temperatures with the standard infinite series retaining a large number of terms is no longer necessary.