Nonlocal thermal diffusion in one-dimensional periodic lattice

•Scale effect of thermal diffusion in one-dimensional periodically micro-structured media.•Continuous nonlocal heat equation built by continualization of the thermal lattice.•Analytical solutions derived from a spatially nonlocal Fourier's law.•Hypothesis of various initial temperature distributions into the edge elements.•Comparison with exact solutions of the linear time-dependent spatial difference equation. Heat conduction in micro-structured rods can be simulated with unidimensional periodic lattices. In this paper, scale effects in conduction problems, and more generally in diffusion problems, are studied from a one-dimensional thermal lattice. The thermal lattice is governed by a mixed differential-difference equation, accounting for some spatial microstructure. Exact solutions of the linear time-dependent spatial difference equation are derived for a thermal lattice under initial uniform temperature field with some temperature perturbations at the boundary. This discrete heat equation is approximated by a continuous nonlocal heat equation built by continualization of the thermal lattice equations. It is shown that such a nonlocal heat equation may be equivalently obtained from a nonlocal Fourier's law. Exact solutions of the thermal lattice problem (discrete heat equation) are compared with the ones of the local and nonlocal heat equation. An error analysis confirms the accurate calibration of the length scale of the nonlocal diffusion law with respect to the lattice spacing. The nonlocal heat equation may efficiently capture scale effect phenomena in periodic thermal lattices.