A boundary element solution approach for the conjugate heat transfer problem in thermally developing region of a thick walled pipe

This paper presents a sole application of boundary element method to the conjugate heat transfer problem of thermally developing laminar flow in a thick walled pipe when the fluid velocities are fully developed. Due to the coupled mechanism of heat conduction in the solid region and heat convection in the fluid region, two separate solutions in the solid and fluid regions are sought to match the solid-fluid interface continuity condition. In this method, the dual reciprocity boundary element method (DRBEM) with the axial direction marching scheme is used to solve the heat convection problem and the conventional boundary element method (BEM) of axisymmetric model is applied to solve the heat conduction problem. An iterative and numerically stable BEM solution algorithm is presented, which uses the coupled interface conditions explicitly instead of uncoupled conditions. Both the local convective heat transfer coefficient at solid-fluid interface and the local mean fluid temperature are initially guessed and updated as the unknown interface thermal conditions in the iterative solution procedure. Two examples imposing uniform temperature and heat flux boundary conditions are tested in thermally developing region and compared with analytic solutions where available. The benchmark test results are shown to be in good agreement with the analytic solutions for both examples with different boundary conditions.