A numerical study on the thermal stimulation of continuous moxibustion

In this paper, the unsteady incompressible Navier-Stokes equation coupled with energy equation was solved in order to investigate the thermal stimulation of continuous moxibustion using a commercial code (ANSYS-Fluent). In the simulations, various periods were selected for the continuous moxibustion, which was done by burning multiple disks successively. It has been found that the depth of the effective stimulation zone increases only when the replacing temperature is equal or larger than body temperature whereas the increase rate of the effective stimulation depth decreases as the number of disc increases. Further, it has been shown that the optimal period, for which the duration time of the effective stimulation zone is maximum, exists.