Abstract

A new conjugate heat-transfer procedure for modeling thermal diffusion process between fluid and structure subdomains is presented. The procedure relies on higher-order Combined Interface Boundary Conditions (CIBC) for improved accuracy and stability of conjugate heat transfer. Traditionally, continuity of temperature and heat flux along interfaces are satisfied through algebraic jump conditions in a staggered fashion. More specifically, Dirichlet temperature conditions are imposed on the fluid side and Neumann heat flux conditions are imposed on the solid side for the stability of conventional sequential staggered procedure. In this type of treatment, the interface introduces additional stability constraints to the coupled thermal simulations. By utilizing the CIBC technique on the Dirichlet boundary conditions, the staggered procedure can be constructed with the same order of accuracy and stability of standalone computations. Using the Godunov-Ryabenkii’s normal mode analysis, a range of coupling parameter that yields stable and accurate interface discretization is explicitly found. The effectiveness of the method is investigated by presenting and discussing performance evaluation data using a 1D finite-difference formulation for each subdomain.