A new meshless method for steady-state heat conduction problems in anisotropic and inhomogeneous media

Summary A new meshless method is developed to analyze steady-state heat conduction problems with arbitrarily spatially varying thermal conductivity in isotropic and anisotropic materials. The analog equation is used to construct equivalent equations to the original differential equation so that a simpler fundamental solution of the Laplacian operator can be employed to take the place of the fundamental solutions related to the original governing equation. Next, the particular solution is approximated by using radial basis functions, and the corresponding homogeneous solution is solved by means of the virtual boundary collocation method. As a result, a new method fully independent of mesh is developed. Finally, several numerical examples are implemented to demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed method. The numerical results show good agreement with the actual results.This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 10472082) and Australian Research Council.