A novel quasi-smooth manifold element method for structural transient heat conduction analysis with radiation and nonlinear boundaries

This study proposes a novel quasi-smooth manifold element (QSME) method to solve structural heat conduction problem. Compared with the conventional finite element (FE) method, the main advantage of the QSME method is the use of high-order local approximation. This ensures the continuity of first-order derivatives at element nodes, enhancing computation accuracy. The results show that the QSME method has high computation accuracy and efficiency. It can effectively solve the nonlinear thermal radiation problem of complex geometries. Under the same degrees of freedom (DOFs), the QSME method achieves at least one-order magnitude higher accuracy than the conventional FE method. Moreover, compared with the FE method, it attains faster convergence rate and requires far less DOFs to achieve the roughly same solution accuracy. This method provides an efficient computational tool for heat conduction analysis and coupled multi-physics simulations.