The Application of Adaptive Finite Element Analysis to Heat and Mass Transfer Problems

The application is discussed of an efficient and reliable adaptive finite element methodology, for the analysis of heat and mass transfer problems, common in thermal processing of agricultural materials and products. The proposed technique first uses a unified error estimator to assess the accuracy and reliability of the finite element solution. It then employs an automatic adaptive refinement strategy to reduce the errors to acceptable values. The proposed methodology is capable of handling linear, non-linear, steady-state and transient problems and can easily be extended and applied to other transport problems.