Book 19

In recent years, an increasing amount of research work has been carried out on the application of the Boundary Element Method (BEM), to a growing variety of problems. The purpose of this book is to extend the range of applications of the BEM, with a view to establishing a sound basis on which to build new solution procedures with particular attention being paid to problems which arise in inverse heat conduction. The minimal energy technique has been introduced to modify the BEM for solving heat conduction problems which are improperly posed and the results indicate that excellent convergent and stable numerical approximate solutions may be obtained for various inverse heat conduction problems, which may be linear or nonlinear, steady or unsteady. Examples show that the agreement between the numerical results and the analytical solutions, where available, is excellent.