Isogeometric and NURBS-enhanced boundary element formulations for steady-state heat conduction with volumetric heat source and nonlinear boundary conditions

Abstract

Boundary Element Method (BEM) is a numerical tool that is applied to many different types of engineering problems. BEM possesses several advantages over other numerical methods such as boundary-only discretization and its semi-analytical nature. Application of Isogeometric Analysis (IGA) to BEM is a recently proposed computational method where the main purpose is to use geometrical basis functions as the shape functions of field variables. Key features of combining these two techniques are the exact representation of the geometry, elimination or suppression of the meshing procedure, reduction of the problem dimension and obtaining highly accurate results especially for the flux values on the boundaries compared to conventional BEM. In this study, steady-state heat conduction problems with nonlinear boundary condition and surface heat source are analyzed where geometries are formed by NURBS, and field variables are described with Lagrangian (constant and quadratic) basis functions and NURBS basis functions. Convergence rates and CPU time of different types of element representations are discussed which eventually reveals the performance and capabilities of IGABEM.