Application of the boundary face method for thermal analysis in dam construction

This paper applies the boundary face method (BFM) to solve both steady-state and unsteady-state heat conduction problems in the dam construction. Instead of employing the isoparametric elements as in the boundary and finite element methods, the BFM uses directly geometric models from CAD packages to avoid geometric errors for any complex structures. Moreover, the variable approximations and the boundary integration are all performed in the parametric space of the boundary surfaces, which means that the elements and integral patches are defined in the parametric space. A numerical example of steady-state analysis presented in this paper is a concrete dam structure which consists of several blocks. The example of unsteady-state analysis, which concerns a single block with several holes in it, has also been presented to illustrate the validity and the efficiency of the proposed method.