A zonal boundary element method for analysing heat exchangers with thin extended surfaces

We present a zonal boundary element method (ZBEM) for the rapid, efficient, and accurate solution of the temperature distribution within extended surfaces whose aspect ratio may be asymptotically large. Our ZBEM employs a block-tridiagonal-matrix solution technique which decouples information which is ‘far apart’ with respect to the smallest dimension of the (asymptotically-thin) solution domain. We calculate asymptotic results for the performance advantage of the ZBEM over the classical BEM (CBEM), which are shown to be in excellent agreement with those of our numerical implementation. We propose that the ZBEM permits solution of asymptotically-large problems on modest computational platforms.