Transient Heat Transfer Analysis in Metal Plates with Variable Thickness

Nonlinear transient heat transfer via conduction–radiation is a dynamic topic of long-standing interest with applications ranging from aeronautical and mechanical engineering to industrial and civil security. To gain a better understanding of the performances of materials having thermal proprieties that change during nonlinear heat transfer, several studies using the finite element method (FEM) have been conducted. Such studies apply nonlinear thermal material characteristics to describe the complete system under different loading conditions in each region by adjusting the temperature values for the other three edges and the thickness parameter with Dirichlet boundary conditions. As a result, while modeling and simulating temperature distributions for such situations, nonlinearities generated by temperature-dependent thermal conductivity must be considered. In this work, we focus on the analysis of coupled transient heat transfer through two metal plates with temperature-dependent thermal characteristics in which the temperature is fixed along the bottom edge and heat is transferred from both the top and bottom faces of the two plates. FEM is employed to solve the nonlinear heat equation and compute the temperature as a function of time for variable thickness. The study examines the effect of modifying the thickness parameter values on the temperature distribution over time for various edge values over 5,000 s.