Accurate Computation of Activated Volume in Electromagnetic Heating

Abstract

In electromagnetic heating and other applications, we need to compute the volume enclosed by an isosurface of the 3D temperature distribution that is numerically represented on a rectangular grid. This situation arises naturally when the temperature distribution is obtained by solving a partial differential equation numerically using a finite difference method. Given the temperature distribution on the 3D grid, the isosurface of a prescribed value is represented approximately by a triangulation, a collection of triangles with vertices on the grid lines. The vertices are determined by a linear interpolation to approximate the locations where the temperature is at the prescribed level. The region enclosed by the isosurface is approximated by that enclosed by the triangulation, which is a set of tetrahedrons. The enclosed volume is approximated by summing those of tetrahedrons. This volume approximation is analogous to approximating a curve using line segments and is limited in accuracy. In this study, we combine extrapolation with the triangulation approximation to develop a more accurate method for computing the volume enclosed by an isosurface of the 3D temperature distribution on a rectangular grid.