Finite element time discretization

The thermal solver uses a θ-scheme [1] to discretize the matrix form of the heat conduction equation in time and find the temperature distribution T n+1 at time t n+1 using the provided temperature distribution T n at time t n:

where:

  • Δt = t n+1 - t n is the current time step.
  • θ is a parameter that defines different transient scheme.

By varying the parameter θ, different transient schemes are obtained to solve the heat conduction equation:

  • First-order explicit scheme in time, when θ = 0.
  • Second order Crank-Nicolson scheme in time, when θ = 1/2.
  • First-order implicit scheme in time, when θ = 1.