This paper presents a fundamental locally one-dimensional (FLOD) method for 3-D thermal simulation. We first propose a locally one-dimensional (LOD) method for heat transfer equation within general inhomogeneous media. The proposed LOD method is then cast into compact form and formulated into the FLOD method with operator-free right-hand-side (RHS), which leads to computationally efficient update equations. Memory storage requirements and boundary conditions for both FLOD and LOD methods are detailed and compared. Stability analysis by means of analyzing the eigenvalues of amplification matrix substantiates the stability of the FLOD method. Additionally, the potential instability of the Douglas Gunn (DG) alternating-direction-implicit (ADI) method for inhomogeneous media is demonstrated. Numerical experiments justify the gain achieved in the overall efficiency for FLOD over LOD, DG-ADI and explicit methods. Furthermore, the relative maximum error of the FLOD method illustrates good trade-off between accuracy and efficiency.

In this paper, the separation of heat generation and heat transfer related to temperature rise of silver palladium contact was investigated experimentally in order to predict the temperature rise of contact by the use conditions such as voltage range between 25 to 40 V, current range between 3.2 to 5.0 A and silver palladium alloy (AgPd) materials. Firstly, relationship between temperature rise of contact and supply power was discussed. The effects of heat generation and heat transfer on temperature rise were separated and quantified by least squares method. Secondly, effects of durations and integral powers of bridge and arc on temperature rise were also discussed by changing supply power. Results show that the integral power of the bridge increases when supply power increases. As the supply power increases, integral power of arc also increases. The temperature rise is dominated by integral power of bridge. Remarkable difference of bridge duration can not be seen in the five materials (AgPd30, AgPd40, AgPd50, AgPd70 and Pd). The supply power is increased, arc duration gets longer. As weight percent of Pd content increases, the effect of supply power on arc duration becomes larger. Consequently, the integral power of arc increases. This study is a basic consideration to realize methods predicting temperature rise of contact.

In microwave hyperthermia for cancer therapy, two power feeding techniques can be utilized: incoherent and coherent operations. In the incoherent operation, not-synchronized microwave power is fed into each array element, whereas the coherent operation is achieved by feeding synchronized microwave to the array elements. The authors have been studying the coaxial-slot antenna for interstitial microwave hyperthermia. The antenna is usually employed as an array applicator inserting several antennas into the tissue to generate large heating area. So far we have examined the control of the heating pattern by feeding techniques in order to obtain more uniform and enlarged heating region. Particularly, `tip-heating,' which means sufficient heating at the area near the tip of the applicator, is significant not to damage surrounding normal tissue in interstitial hyperthermia. In this paper, two feeding techniques are combined and calculated temperature distributions in a hexagonal array applicator are examined by solving Pennes bioheat transfer equation by finite difference method. As a result, in the coherent feeding, large heating area was obtained, while better tip-heating was achieved in the incoherent feeding. Moreover, an instance of sequential combination of two feeding techniques is depicted. In this case, temperature distribution had both characteristics of large heating area and tip-heating, therefore the ability of the control of heating characteristics by sequential combination of the coherent and the incoherent feedings was presented.