The Heat-Balance Integral—Further Considerations and Refinements

Abstract

Integral methods have previously been applied to transient heat conduction in a slab with constant thermal properties. In this paper the method is extended so as to include temperature-dependent thermal properties in the analysis. In addition, it is shown how to improve the accuracy of a solution by increasing the order of the polynomial used to represent the temperature profile. For the case of a prescribed step surface temperature in a semi-infinite slab, a quartic profile is shown to give excellent accuracy.