Adaptive FEM/BEM coupling for solving global heat transfer in high-temperature furnaces

We show that by a combination of adaptive finite-element (FEM) and boundary-element methods (BEM) as well as algorithms from computer graphics it is possible to do effective 3-D simulations of heat transfer in industrial high-temperature furnaces with vacuum chambers including heat conduction and heat radiation in enclosures. To do this, we develop a flexible and effective coupling scheme to connect the volume temperature distribution with the surface temperature distribution and allow for independent grid refinement of the volume and surface mesh. Both refinements relay on an error estimator, one for the radiation and the other for the conduction.