Heat transfer element for modeling the thermal response of non-uniformly heated plates

This paper presents a novel heat transfer element for modeling the 3D thermal response in plates and shells exposed to non-uniform heating. The formulation uses a combination of finite element and control volume techniques to discretize the governing equations into a series of 2D layers that are linked by a finite difference calculation. While a combination of techniques are used in the element formulation, the governing element equations are in a form that can readily be implemented into a commercial finite element code. The nine-node quadratic element considered here is implemented in ABAQUS as a user-defined element. Two- and three-dimensional verification cases are presented to demonstrate the capabilities of the element. Comparisons between the proposed shell heat transfer element and traditional continuum elements demonstrate that the proposed model exhibits a high level of accuracy and requires minimal computational power. The layered formulation offers the additional advantage of simplifying the transfer of temperature data from a thermal analysis to a structural analysis because both models can have the same mesh.