ES-PIM with cell death and birth technique for simulating heat transfer in concrete dam construction process

Abstract

The meshfree edge-based smoothed point interpolation method (ES-PIM) is extended to the simulation of transient heat transfer problems for concrete dams in the construction process. The present ES-PIM consists of the following ingredients: (1) a novel cell death and birth technique is proposed to deal with the existence or nonexistence of the concrete layers, and hence the construction process of dams can be easily simulated; (2) a lumped diagonalization procedure for specific heat matrix is implemented to improve the stability and efficiency of transient computations; and (3) the triangular background cells are used to construct the nonoverlapping smoothing integral subdomains, and the cell-based T3- and T6/3-schemes are adopted for the node selection in the formation of PIM shape functions. On the basis of the weakened weak formulation, the ES-PIM is spatially stable and convergent to the exact solution. The ES-PIM can achieve better results in accuracy and convergence rate, in comparison with the finite element method using the same meshes. © 2012 American Society of Civil Engineers.