Simulation of Unsteady Heat Transfer within a Human Head with Perfusion

I have applied my 3-D FEA software to the simulation of unsteady heat transfer within a human head with blood perfusion.

Linear tetrahedrons (43448 elements total) were used for spacial integration of the PDE. Crank-Nicholson was used for the time integration. A time step of 10 seconds was used and the total number of time steps performed was 360. The final time was 60 minutes. A uniform initial temperature of 37 degrees C was used. A fixed temperature of  0 degrees C was used on all the mesh boundaries except the face and base of the neck. A uniform temp. of 25 deg. C was used on the face and 37 deg. C was used on the base of the neck. A constant arterial temperature, Tart, of 31, 33, and 35 deg. C was used. The linear system is solved implicitely at each time step using an iterative CG -like method with incomplete factorization. The final solution for the previous time step is used as the initial guess for the iterative solver which provides enhanced converge rates. This  entire simulation was done on my notebook PC (PIII 700 MHz) in less than 20 minutes.

No perfusion	Tart = 31 C
Tart = 33 C	Tart = 35 C