A CQM-based BEM for transient heat conduction problems in homogeneous materials and FGMs

A method for numerical solution of time-domain boundary integral formulations of transient problems governed by the heat equation is presented. The heat conduction problem is analyzed considering homogeneous and non-homogeneous media. In the case of the non-homogeneous media, the conductor material is assumed to be a functionally graded material, i.e., the material properties vary spatially according to known smooth functions. For some specific spatial variations of the material properties, the fundamental solution and the boundary integral equation of the problem are obtained thanks to a change of variables that transforms the original problem to the standard heat conduction problem for homogeneous materials. For the treatment of time-dependent terms, the convolution quadrature method is adopted to approximate numerically the integral equation of the time-domain boundary element method. In the case that the responses are required at a large number of interior points, the convolution performed to calculate them is very time consuming. It is shown that the discrete convolution of the proposed formulation can be computed by means of the fast Fourier transform technique, which considerably reduces the computational complexity. Results for some transient heat conduction examples are presented to validate the numerical techniques studied.