A spectral element method for solving the Pennes bioheat transfer equation by using triangular and quadrilateral elements

A spectral element method is developed for the numerical solution of the Pennes bioheat transfer equation which models the thermal behavior of the living tissue. For the one and two dimensional cases, the implementation of this method is completely explained. In the two dimensional case, both triangular and quadrilateral elements are investigated. Through test problems, the discretization error generated from this method is reported. In the triangular elements, the error is obtained when quadrature points coincide and do not coincide with nodal points. This method is employed to solve the equation in order to obtain the temperature of the skin layers, healthy tissue, and tissue that contains the tumor.