Parabolic Heat Conduction Specialized Applications Involving Imperfect Contact Surfaces: Local Discontinuous Galerkin Finite Element Method—Part 2

Abstract

Parabolic heat conduction specialized applications involving imperfect thermal contact surfaces are analyzed via the Local Discontinuous Galerkin (LDG) finite element method. In this paper, we describe the advantages of the LDG finite element formulation over the traditional continuous Galerkin (CG) finite element method for modeling imperfect thermal contact between surfaces. To-date, mostly interface/gap elements have been primarily used to model the imperfect contact between two surfaces to solve thermal contact resistance problems. The LDG method eliminates the use of such interface/gap elements and provides a higher degree of accuracy. Several illustrative 2-D applications highlight the effectiveness of the present LDG finite element formulations for this class of problems.