Transient heat conduction analysis using the NURBS-enhanced scaled boundary finite element method and modified precise integration method

The Non-uniform rational B-spline (NURBS) enhanced scaled boundary finite element method in combination with the modified precise integration method is proposed for the transient heat conduction problems in this paper. The scaled boundary finite element method is a semi-analytical technique, which weakens the governing differential equations along the circumferential direction and solves those analytically in the radial direction. In this method, only the boundary is discretized in the finite element sense leading to a reduction of the spatial dimension by one with no fundamental solution required. Nevertheless, in case of the complex geometry, a huge number of elements are generally required to properly approximate the exact shape of the domain and distorted meshes are often unavoidable in the conventional finite element approach, which leads to huge computational efforts and loss of accuracy. NURBS are the most popular mathematical tool in CAD industry due to its flexibility to fit any free-form shape. In the proposed methodology, the arbitrary curved boundary of problem domain is exactly represented with NURBS basis functions, while the straight part of the boundary is discretized by the conventional Lagrange shape functions. Both the concepts of isogeometric analysis and scaled boundary finite element method are combined to form the governing equations of transient heat conduction analysis and the solution is obtained using the modified precise integration method. The stiffness matrix is obtained from a standard quadratic eigenvalue problem and the mass matrix is determined from the low-frequency expansion. Finally the governing equations become a system of first-order ordinary differential equations and the time domain response is solved numerically by the modified precise integration method. The accuracy and stability of the proposed method to deal with the transient heat conduction problems are demonstrated by numerical examples.