A new alternating iteration strategy based on the proper orthogonal decomposition for solving large-scaled transient nonlinear heat conduction problems

In this paper, the application of Free Element Method (FREM) is extended to the transient nonlinear heat conduction problems, and the characteristics of anisotropic, heterogeneous, temperature-dependent thermophysical properties and heat generation are also involved. In order to improve the efficiency during the nonlinear iterations, an alternating iteration strategy, FREM-ROM, is proposed, in which the proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) technique is used to establish a sectionalized extrapolation algorithm with lower dimensions and sufficiently high accuracy. This iteration strategy reduces the computational scale by using the Reduced-Order Model (ROM) technique and can guarantee the accuracy by continually correcting the database and POD bases every few time steps during the process of iterations. It also has the potential to be applied to other numerical methods for improved the efficiency. The accuracy and efficiency are examined by two numerical examples, in which the 2D example illustrates the relationship between truncated basis and accuracy in detail, and the heat transfer performance of a large-scale 3D cross-fin heat sink(CFHS) is investigated to highlight the efficiency advantages of solving large-scaled practical problems.