Fast explicit dynamics finite element algorithm for transient heat transfer

Abstract

This paper presents a novel methodology for fast simulation and analysis of transient heat transfer. The proposed methodology is suitable for real-time applications owing to (i) establishing the solution method from the viewpoint of computationally efficient explicit dynamics, (ii) proposing an element-level thermal load computation to eliminate the need for assembling global thermal stiffness, leading to (iii) an explicit formulation of nodal temperature computation to eliminate the need for iterations anywhere in the algorithm, (iv) pre-computing the constant matrices and simulation parameters to facilitate online calculation, and (v) utilising computationally efficient finite elements to efficiently obtain thermal responses in the spatial domain, all of which lead to a significant reduction in computation time for fast run-time simulation. The proposed fast explicit dynamics finite element algorithm (FED-FEM) employs nonlinear thermal material properties, such as temperature-dependent thermal conductivity and specific heat capacity, and nonlinear thermal boundary conditions, such as heat convection and radiation, to account for nonlinear characteristics of transient heat transfer. Simulations and comparison analyses demonstrate that not only can the proposed methodology handle isotropic, orthotropic, anisotropic and temperature-dependent thermal properties but also satisfy the standard patch tests and achieve good agreement with those of the commercial finite element analysis packages for numerical accuracy, for 3-D heat conduction, convection, radiation, and thermal gradient concentration problems. Furthermore, the proposed FED-FEM algorithm is computationally efficient and only consumes a small computation time, capable of achieving real-time computational performance, leading to a novel methodology suitable for real-time simulation and analysis of transient heat transfer.

arXiv commentPublished in International Journal of Thermal Sciences

References in corpus (1)

• Deformable Models for Surgical Simulation: A Survey

Cited by in corpus (7)

• A massively parallel explicit solver for elasto-dynamic problems exploiting octree meshes
• Fast computation of soft tissue thermal response under deformation based on fast explicit dynamics finite element algorithm for surgical simulation
• Real-time computation of bio-heat transfer in the fast explicit dynamics finite element algorithm (FED-FEM) framework
• Towards real-time finite-strain anisotropic thermo-visco-elastodynamic analysis of soft tissues for thermal ablative therapy
• Model-based approach for analyzing prevalence of nuclear cataracts in elderly residents
• Meshless Fragile Points Methods Based on Petrov-Galerkin Weak-Forms for Transient Heat Conduction Problems in Complex Anisotropic Nonhomogeneous Media
• A New Meshless "Fragile Points Method" and A Local Variational Iteration Method for General Transient Heat Conduction in Anisotropic Nonhomogeneous Media