A meshless method for conjugate heat transfer problems

Mesh reduction methods such as boundary element methods, method of fundamental solutions, and spectral methods all lead to fully populated matrices. This poses serious challenges for large-scale three-dimensional problems due to storage requirements and iterative solution of a large set of non-symmetric equations. Researchers have developed several approaches to address this issue including the class of fast-multipole techniques, use of wavelet transforms, and matrix decomposition. In this paper, we develop a domain decomposition, or the artificial sub-sectioning technique, along with a region-by-region iteration algorithm particularly tailored for parallel computation to address the coefficient matrix issue. The meshless method we employ is based on expansions using radial-basis functions (RBFs). An efficient physically based procedure provides an effective initial guess of the temperatures along the sub-domain interfaces. The iteration process converges very efficiently, offers substantial savings in memory, and features superior computational efficiency. The meshless iterative domain decomposition technique is ideally suited for parallel computation. We discuss its implementation under MPI standards on a small Windows XP PC cluster. Numerical results reveal the domain decomposition meshless methods produce accurate temperature predictions while requiring a much-reduced effort in problem preparation in comparison to other traditional numerical methods. (c) 2004 Published by Elsevier Ltd.