Research of Processes of Spontaneous Ignition in an Stockpile with a Rectangular Section Using Rothe’s and Two-Sided Approximations Methods

Self-ignition of a stockpile of material (coal, peat, grain) occurs as a result of the accumulation of heat released by an exothermic reaction of oxidation, which makes it possible to consider the stockpile as a body with an internal heat source. The research of self-ignition processes using mathematical modeling methods leads to the need to find a solution to the initial boundary value problem for a two-dimensional semilinear heat conduction equation. This cannot always be done analytically, so it makes sense to use numerical analysis methods. The aim of this article is to apply Rothe’s method in combination with the method of two-sided approximations based on the use of the Green's function to find the solution of the initial boundary value problem for the two-dimensional semilinear heat conduction equation that arises during the mathematical modeling of self-ignition processes of an stockpile of bulk material of cylindrical shape with a rectangular base. To achieve the goal, after the discretization of the heat conduction equation by the time variable, a sequence of boundary value problems was obtained by the Rothe’s method, each of which was reduced to the Hammerstein equation. For this nonlinear operator equation, an iterative process of the two-way method was constructed with its stopping condition obtained through a posteriori error estimation. The power of the internal heat source was approximated using an exponential dependence. As a result of the computational experiment, a sequence of approximate solutions was obtained. The graphs of heat maps constructed for them made it possible to examine over time the course of the self-ignition process in the cross-section of a stockpile of cylindrical shape with a rectangular base and to identify areas of heat accumulation