Parallel numerical tool for the heat conduction problem in three-dimensional packed spheres

A 3D parallel numerical tool developed to simulate heat conduction between packed spheres is presented, validated and compared with its serial version. This tool allows computing heat transfer in any arrangement of spheres in contact and under different boundary conditions. The parallel version is simple to implement as different spheres are handled by different processors. Additionally, a special treatment is proposed to deal with the heat transferred through the contacts between spheres to avoid internal iterations at each time step. For a particular two-dimensional arrangement of spheres, where each sphere has at most three contacts, the parallel version yields an efficiency of 50%.