Numerical solution of the Kiessl model

summary:The Kiessl model of moisture and heat transfer in generally nonhomogeneous porous materials is analyzed. A weak formulation of the problem of propagation of the state parameters of this model, which are so-called moisture potential and temperature, is derived. An application of the method of discretization in time leads to a system of boundary-value problems for coupled pairs of nonlinear second order ODE’s. Some existence and regularity results for these problems are proved and an efficient numerical approach based on a certain special linearization scheme and the Petrov-Galerkin method is suggested