A thermal wave approach for heat transfer in a nonuniform soil

A novel thermal wave model is developed for studying heat transfer in nonuniform soils. The model, which is based on the wave-like characteristics of periodic heat now, discretizes the soil into sublayers. The total thermal reflection and transmission coefficients at the interfaces of those sublayers are formulated and then employed to construct the soil temperature and heat flux profiles from their values at the air-soil interface. Numerical simulations showed that the thermal wave model could predict the predictions of two exact analytic models for the temperature profiles and their derivatives.