NUMERICAL METHOD FOR THE COMPUTATION OF CONJUGATE HEAT TRANSFER IN NONORTHOGONAL BOUNDARY-FITTED COORDINATES

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Abstract
Physical situations where heat transfer occurs between materials with differing properties are commonly encountered in engineering practice, and often the geometries of interest are irregular. A method is proposed for discretization of the conductive heal fluxes for nonorthogonal coordinates, which accounts for the possible discontinuities in the thermal conductivity in the domain. In the resulting numerical solution method, the temperature field over the entire domain can be treated in a unified manner without need for separate solutions over regions with distinct physical properties. Accuracy and consistency of the proposed discretization are assessed, and the utility of the proposed procedure is illustrated by solving conjugate heat transfer in two problems representative of those encountered in practice.