Calculation of Green's functions for heat conduction in curved anisotropic media

Abstract Solving the inverse problems of heat conduction often requires performing a very large number of Green's function evaluations. This paper addresses the calculation of Green's functions in anisotropic curved media, such as composite lamina, where the principal axes of thermal conductivity follow the curved surface. We start with established exact series solutions for cylindrical convex and concave shapes. These solutions are extended to accommodate geometries of real‐world composite materials that do not form a closed surface like a cylinder. Unfortunately, the exact solutions have the form of an infinite series of sums or integrals and are computationally infeasible for the inverse problems of interest, especially for large radii of curvature. This motivates a perturbation solution that is accurate and computationally efficient at large radii of curvature. In addition, it motivates a phenomenological approximation that is extremely computationally efficient over a broad range of curvatures, but with some sacrifice in accuracy. These solutions are compared with exact solutions, with each other, and with numerical finite difference calculation. We identify regions in parameter space where the different approaches are preferable and where they lead to the same numerical result.