An explicit numerical method for solving transient combined heat conduction and convection problems

This paper describes an explicit numerical method for solving transient combined heat conduction and convection problems. Applications include the cooling of many types of engineering plant; for example, stator and rotor windings of turbogenerators and high voltage underground cables. The Du Fort–Frankel and the fully implicit finite difference schemes have been used to solve the conduction and convection equations, respectively. It is shown that, with a suitable order of calculation, the overall method becomes explicit. Computational procedures are outlined and stability, accuracy and convergence are considered. Numerical examples are given to illustrate the use of the method and to validate some of the theoretical points. Results have also been obtained using existing numerical methods and have been compared with those from the proposed method. For certain problems, it is shown that the proposed method uses less overall computing time than other methods such as that devised by Crank and Nicolson.