The Transversal Method of Lines (TMOL) Applied to Unsteady Conduction in Large Plates, Long Cylinders and Spheres With Prescribed Surface Heat Flux

The Transversal Method Of Lines (TMOL) or Rothe method is a general technique for solving parabolic partial differential equations that uses a two-point backward finite-difference formulation for the time derivative and differential spatial derivatives. This hybrid approach leads to transformed ordinary differential equations where the spatial coordinate is the independent variable and the time appears as an embedded parameter. The transformed ordinary differential equations may have constant or variable coefficients depending on the coordinate system and are first-order accurate. In this work, TMOL is applied to the 1-D heat equation for large plates, long cylinders and spheres with constant thermophysical properties, uniform initial temperature and prescribed surface heat flux. The analytic solutions of the adjoint heat equations are performed with the symbolic Maple software. It is demonstrated that the approximate semi-analytic TMOL temperature distributions for the three simple bodies are much better than first-order accurate. This signifies that TMOL temperature distributions are not only valid for short times, but they are valid for the entire heating period involving short, moderate and long times.