Application of the boundary face method for thermal analysis in dam construction

Abstract

This paper applies the boundary face method (BFM) to solve both steady-state and unsteady-state heat conduction problems in the dam construction. Instead of employing the isoparametric elements as in the boundary and finite element methods, the BFM uses directly geometric models from CAD packages to avoid geometric errors for any complex structures. Moreover, the variable approximations and the boundary integration are all performed in the parametric space of the boundary surfaces, which means that the elements and integral patches are defined in the parametric space. A numerical example of steady-state analysis presented in this paper is a concrete dam structure which consists of several blocks. The example of unsteady-state analysis, which concerns a single block with several holes in it, has also been presented to illustrate the validity and the efficiency of the proposed method.

Keywords:

• Boundary face method
• steady-state heat conduction
• unsteady-state heat conduction
• dam construction
• small holes

Additional information

Notes on contributors

J He

Jianping He received his BE and MS in engineering mechanics from Central China Institute of Technology, China, in 1990 and 2006, respectively. He is now working toward his PhD at the College of Mechanical and Vehicle Engineering in Hunan University, China. He is also working as a senior engineer in the Hydrochina Zhongnan Engineering Corporation. His research activities are concerned with computer simulation of problems in hydro and mechanics.

F Zhou

Fenglin Zhou received his BE degree in information and computation science from Beijing Jiaotong University, China, in 2008. He is currently working toward his PhD at the College of Mechanical and Vehicle Engineering, Hunan University, China. His research activities are concerned with numerical methods for heat transfer problem and the boundary integral equation method.

J Zhang

Jianming Zhang received his PhD in engineering mechanics from Tsinghua University, China, in 2002. He then started postdoctoral research at Shinshu University, Japan, with Prof Masataka Tanaka. He became a JSPS fellow in 2005, and the research was funded until he joined Hunan University, China, in 2007. Since 2007, he has been employed as a professor in college of mechanical and vehicle engineering at Hunan University. He has been engaged in research of the boundary integral equation method and its applications in engineering problems.

L Liu

Luping Liu is a professor-level senior engineer in Hydrochina Zhongnan Engineering Corporation. He has been engaged in the work of hydropower engineering. His research has been chiefly concerned with the design of dams and schemes for temperature management during the construction of dams.

G Li

Guangyao Li received his PhD degree in computational mechanics from Hohai University, China. He is a professor in the College of Mechanical and Vehicle Engineering in Hunan University, China. His research interests include numerical methods in mechanical simulation and their engineering applications.