Purpose
This paper aims to propose an efficient and accurate method to analyse the transient heat conduction in a periodic structure with moving heat sources.
Design/methodology/approach
The moving heat source is modelled as a localised Gaussian distribution in space. Based on the spatial distribution, the physical feature of transient heat conduction and the periodic property of structure, a special feature of temperature responses caused by the moving heat source is illustrated. Then, combined with the superposition principle of linear system, within a small time-step, computation of results corresponding to the whole structure excited by the Gaussian heat source is transformed into that of some small-scale structures. Lastly, the precise integration method (PIM) is used to solve the temperature responses of each small-scale structure efficiently and accurately.
Findings
Within a reasonable time-step, the heat source applied on a unit cell can only cause the temperature responses of a limited number of adjacent unit cells. According to the above feature and the periodic property of a structure, the contributions caused by the moving heat source for the most of time-steps are repeatable, and the temperature responses of the entire periodic structure can be obtained by some small-scale structures.
Originality/value
A novel numerical method is proposed for analysing moving heat source problems, and the numerical examples demonstrate that the proposed method is much more efficient than the traditional methods, even for larger-scale problems and multiple moving heat source problems.
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