ITERATIVE METHOD FOR THE NUMERICAL PREDICTION OF HEAT TRANSFER IN PROBLEMS INVOLVING LARGE DIFFERENCES IN THERMAL CONDUCTIVITIES

Abstract

Heal exchange that occurs between materials with largely differing thermal conductivities is commonly encountered in engineering practice. Conventional iterative solution methods perform poorly for the numerical solution of such problems. A block correction procedure, designed for enhancing the convergence of iterative solution methods, is used in conjunction with the line-by-line iterative solution method. The overall solution algorithm is a multigrid strategy with two grid levels. Results of computations for test problems indicate that the proposed solution procedure enables efficient solution of heat transfer problems with large conductivity differences for which the conventional line-by-line method proves ineffective.