An efficient procedure for solving coupled problem of fluid/solid heat transfer

In this paper, an efficient procedure of computing for the fluid/solid coupled problem of heat transfer is proposed. Thinking of a heat transfer phenomenon, the time scale to reach the steady state is different between the temperature field and the velocity field. In the case of gas, the velocity field reaches the steady state earlier than the temperature field usually. Utilizing this difference of the time scale between the temperature field and the velocity field, we developed a procedure which can reduce a computation cost. The proposed procedure is able to be applied to an unsteady heat transfer problem. The predicted temperature field becomes a steady state earlier and the computation cost can be smaller than the computed results without the present method. We applied the developed method to both the natural convection problem and the forced convection problem, and we examined the present method with the computation time to reach the steady state of the temperature field and the numerical error of the steady state. In consequence, we found that the computational cost could be lower and the numerical error of the steady state was still very small by this proposed method. Thus the present procedure is effective for an analysis of the steady state. (author)