ADAPTIVE FINITE-ELEMENT ANALYSIS OF TRANSIENT THERMAL PROBLEMS

A new adaptive finite element procedure for the solution of transient heat conduction problems is described. The proposed technique is capable of accounting for the effect of the boundary conditions on the discretization error, which is usually significant in boundary-value problems and is neglected by other researchers. A new adaptive strategy for transient problems considering the error behavior is also presented. The technique can be applied to both linear and nonlinear problems. Several heat conduction problems are used to evaluate the performance of the method. Results obtained show significant improvements when compared with the conventional finite element approach.