Domain Decomposition for 3D Boundary Elements in Non-Linear Heat Conduction

In this paper, we develop a domain decomposition, or the artificial sub-sectioning technique, along with a region-by-region iteration algorithm particularly tailored for parallel computation to address storage and memory issues arising from large-scale boundary element models. A coarse surface grid solution coupled with an efficient physically-based procedure provides an effective initial guess for a fine surface grid model. The process converges very efficiently offering substantial savings in memory. We discuss the implementation of the iterative domain decomposition approach for parallel computation on a modest Windows XP Pentium P4 PC-cluster running under MPI. Results from 3-D BEM heat conduction models including models of upwards of 85,000 nodes demonstrate that the BEM can practically be used to solve large-scale linear- and non-linear heat conduction problems using this algorithm.