Abstract
Purpose: Heat transfers phenomena are described by the second order partial differential equation and its boundary conditions. In a three-dimensional structure of a building, the heat transfer phenomena generally include more than one material, and thus, become complicate. The analytic solutions are useful to understand heat transfer phenomena, but they can hardly be applied in engineering or design problems. Engineers and designers have generally been forced to use numerical methods providing reliable results. Finite volume methods with the unstructured grid system is only the suitable means of the analysis for the complex and arbitrary domains. Method: To obtain an numerical solution, a discretization method, which approximates the differential equations, and the interpolation methods for temperature and heat flux between two or more materials are required. The discretization methods are applied to small domains in space and time, and these numerical solutions form the descretized equations provide approximated solutions in both space and time. The accuracy of numerical solutions is dependent on the quality of discretizations and size of cells used. The higher accuracy, the higher numerical resources are required. The balance between the accuracy and difficulty of the numerical methods is critical for the success of the numerical analysis. A simple and easy interpolation methods among multiple materials are developed. The linear equations are solved with the BiCGSTAB being a effective matrix solver. Result: This study provides an overview of discretization methods, boundary interface, and matrix solver for the 3-dimensional numerical heat transfer including two materials.
