Thin layers appear in many applications in the field of aerospace engineering. Examples include external thin coatings of bare panels exposed to periodic solar radiation, or the internal thin glue layer connecting the complex parts in aircraft or satellites, which are exposed to a sudden thermal shock.
The thin layer has different mechanical and thermal properties from its surroundings and is usually smaller by an order of magnitude from its surrounding media.
The two opposite approaches to handle the modeling and analysis of such thin layers are either to ignore the layer or to fully model it, using the Finite Element (FE) method for example. The former approach may suffer from severe inaccuracy, while the latter is time consuming for the human modeler and computationally expensive.
Special asymptotic models that constitute a compromise between these two approaches have been proposed for linear heat transfer and linear elasticity. In these models the thin layer is replaced by an interface of zero thickness, and specific jump conditions are imposed in order to represent the special effect of the layer.
In our work we adopt the first-order asymptotic interface model that was developed by Bövik and Benveniste and incorporate it in a FE formulation for linear time-dependent heat conduction problems. In this seminar we will show the capability of this approach to yield an accurate and efficient computational scheme for both internal and external thin layers.
