This paper presents three boundary meshless methods for solving problems of steady-state and transient heat conduction in nonlinear functionally graded materials (FGMs). The three methods are, respectively, the method of fundamental solution (MFS), the boundary knot method (BKM), and the collocation Trefftz method (CTM) in conjunction with Kirchhoff transformation and various variable transformations. In the analysis, Laplace transform technique is employed to handle the time variable in transient heat conduction problem and the Stehfest numerical Laplace inversion is applied to retrieve the corresponding time-dependent solutions. The proposed MFS, BKM and CTM are mathematically simple, easy-to-programming, meshless, highly accurate and integration-free. Three numerical examples of steady state and transient heat conduction in nonlinear FGMs are considered, and the results are compared with those from meshless local boundary integral equation method (LBIEM) and analytical solutions to demonstrate the efficiency of the present schemes.

Detecting corrosion by electrical field can be modeled by a Cauchy problem of Laplace equation in annulus domain under the assumption that the thickness of the pipe is relatively small compared with the radius of the pipe. The interior surface of the pipe is inaccessible and the nondestructive detection is solely based on measurements from the outer layer. The Cauchy problem for an elliptic equation is a typical ill-posed problem whose solution does not depend continuously on the boundary data. In this work, we assume that the measurements are available on the whole outer boundary on an annulus domain. By imposing reasonable assumptions, the theoretical goal here is to derive the stabilities of the Cauchy solutions and an energy regularization method. Relationship between the proposed energy regularization method and the Tikhonov regularization with Morozov principle is also given. A novel numerical algorithm is proposed and numerical examples are given.