Investigation on the Use of a Spacetime Formalism for Modeling and Numerical Simulations of Heat Conduction Phenomena

The question of frame-indifference of the thermomechanical models has to be addressed to deal correctly with the behavior of matter undergoing finite transformations. In this work, we propose to test a spacetime formalism to investigate the benefits of the covariance principle for application to covariant modeling and numerical simulations for finite transformations. Several models especially for heat conduction are proposed following this framework and next compared to existing models. This article also investigates numerical simulations using the heat equation with two different thermal dissipative models for heat conduction, without thermomechanical couplings. The numerical comparison between the spacetime thermal models derived in this work and the corresponding Newtonian thermal models, which adds the time as a discretized variable, is also performed through an example to investigate their advantages and drawbacks.