Quadratic time elements for time-dependent fundamental solution in the BEM for heat transfer modeling

In this paper, a quadratic time interpolation for temperature and a linear time interpolation for fluxes are implemented for the parabolic (time-dependent) fundamental solution-based scheme for solving transient heat transfer problems with sources using the subdomain BEM (boundary element method), which is the main innovation of this paper. The approach described in this work to incorporate the quadratic time variation does not require doubling the number of equations, which is otherwise required in the BEM literature, for the discretized problem to be well-conditioned. Moreover, the numerical accuracy, compared over an unprecedented range of the Fourier number (Fo) and source strength values, can help in selecting the appropriate scheme for a given application, depending on the rate of the heat transfer process and the included source term. The newly implemented scheme based on the parabolic fundamental solution is compared with the well-established elliptic (Laplace) scheme, where the time derivative of the temperature is approximated with the second-order finite difference scheme, on two examples.