Numerical modeling of transport barrier formation

In diverse media the characteristics of mass and heat transfer may undergo spontaneous and abrupt changes in time and space. This can lead to the formation of regions with strongly reduced transport, so called transport barriers (TB). The presence of interfaces between regions with qualitatively and quantitatively different transport characteristics impose severe requirements to methods and numerical schemes used by solving of transport equations. In particular the assumptions made in standard methods about the solution behavior by representing its derivatives fail in points where the transport changes abruptly. The situation is complicated further by the fact that neither the formation time nor the positions of interfaces are known a priori. A numerical approach, operating reliably under such conditions, is proposed. It is based on the introduction of a new dependent variable related to the variation after one time step of the original one integrated over the volume. In the vicinity of any grid knot the resulting differential equation is approximated by a second order ordinary differential equation with constant coefficients. Exact analytical solutions of these equations are conjugated between knots by demanding the continuity of the total solution and its first derivative. As an example the heat transfer in media with heat conductivity decreasing abruptly when the temperature e-folding length exceeds a critical value is considered. The formation of TB both at a heating power above the critical level and caused with radiation energy losses non-linearly dependent on the temperature is modeled.