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.