A meshless average source boundary node method for steady-state heat conduction in general anisotropic media

The average source boundary node method (ASBNM) is a recent boundary-type meshless method, which uses only the boundary nodes in the solution procedure without involving any element or integration notion, that is truly meshless and easy to implement. This paper documents the first attempt to extend the ASBNM for solving the steady-state heat conduction problems in general anisotropic media. Noteworthily, for boundary-type meshless/meshfree methods which depend on the boundary integral equations, whatever their forms are, a key but difficult issue is to accurately and efficiently determine the diagonal coefficients of influence matrices. In this study, we develop a new scheme to evaluate the diagonal coefficients via the pure boundary node implementation based on coupling a new regularized boundary integral equation with direct unknowns of considered problems and the average source technique (AST). Seven two- and three-dimensional benchmark examples are tested in comparison with some existing methods. Numerical results demonstrate that the present ASBNM is superior in the light of overall accuracy, efficiency, stability and convergence rates, especially for the solution of the boundary quantities.