Two Phase Heat Transfer on Porous Media Base Termite Nest Structure with Finite Element Method

Abstract

Termites have a unique heat regulation where termite nests can maintain a stable temperature even though the temperature outside the nest changes. The termite nest itself has a porous structure that causes the temperature to move with a certain mechanism. The temperature in termite nests is considered to move through two phases, namely the conduction phase and the convection phase. The purpose of this research is to build a thermal insulation model and numerical analysis of thermal insulation models. The thermal insulation model in termite nests is made with a porous media approach. Furthermore, finite element methods are used for simulation and numerical analysis of thermal insulation models in termite nests. Finite element method with Galerkin for element discretization and Runge-Kutta for time discretization. The finite element method simulates thermal distribution in termite nests. The thermal insulation model was validated with original data using MAPE and R2 Score. The validation results obtained the MAPE score is 3% for the conduction phase and 0.2% for the convection phase. Changes in parameters have a significant effect on conduction but not convection.