Stability analysis of numerical interface conditions in fluid-structure thermal analysis

This paper analyses the numerical stability of coupling procedures in modelling the thermal diffusion in a solid and a fluid with continuity of temperature and heat flux at the interface. A simple one-dimensional model is employed with uniform material properties and grid density in each domain. A number of different explicit and implicit algorithms are considered for both the interior equations and the boundary conditions. The analysis shows that in general these are stable provided that Dirichlet boundary conditions are imposed on the fluid and Neumann boundary conditions are imposed on the solid; in each case the imposed values are obtained from the other domains. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.