Further developments towards a new virtual‐pulse time integral methodology for general non‐linear transient thermal analysis

New developments of describing the theoretical basis towards an effective virtual-pulse (VIP) time integral methodology are proposed for general non-linear transient heat transfer problems. Primarily to validate the proposed methodology of computation, simple numerical test cases are provided and comparisons are also drawn with the implicit second-order-accurate Crank-Nicolson method. For the models tested, the proposed method has comparable or improved accuracy and stability characteristics. The VIP methodology introduced here for tackling non-linear thermal problems offers attractive features and is a viable alternative to traditional time-stepping practices. Efforts are underway to demonstrate the practical applicability to multi-dimensional thermal analysis.