A numerical calculation of nonlinear transient heat conduction in the fuel elements of a nuclear reactor

Analysis of the nine-point finite difference approximation for the heat conduction equation in a nuclear fuel element

“…In the finite-difference methods as used in various references [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8], the differential equations are approximated by the five-point difference equations at the mesh points and are usually of low order truncation error (see Appendix A). On the other hand, finite element method based on Galerkin or weighted residual procedure require the computation of integrals at each step which may not be an easy calculation in problems such as conduction in nuclear fuel elements [9].…”