<p>I was wondering if anyone knew of any good program to simulate transient and steady-state heat conduction in a rod? I have Matlab, but I cant find any good books with the codes I need. Something that let me code animation. Femlab is out of the question.</p>
<p>Thanks</p>
<p>Are you just trying to plot temperature as a function of time or position?</p>
<p>Both. I’m doing it as an animation as a result. The graph should should show temperature and the position. As time passes, the temperature profile will slowly changed. I’m trying to something like the VRheat in Matlab, but the tutorial isn’t helpful.</p>
<p>Any mechanical engineers or chemical engineers out there?..Femlab is ok too I guess, but I’m not very familiar with that program…</p>
<p>I’m not sure about the animation side but the plotting or time response should be simple. If you are ONLY looking at conduction just use the classical heat transfer equations and specify the area and thermal resistance. If you are taking into account convection as well, there are typical fin equations you can find in a Heat Transfer text or the internet. Keep in mind that you need to take into account the geometry of the fin, whether the area changes as a function of distance and whether you can treat it as infinitely long.</p>
<p>Yes, I got all the derivation down to that point. All assumptions were made including the infinitely long rod and the Biot number is less than 1 so temperature variation is only significant in the x-axis (ignore any variation in the radial or angle direction-no Bessel functions here :)). I have the theoretical transient equation set up as well as the steady-state. Radiation was insignificant as well as convection in this experiment. I just need to know if there’s a good book out there or some kind of tutorial for me to model this experiment. The problem should be easy enough for Matlab to handle, but I’ll use Femlab if its easier to model it there :(</p>
<p>I’ve used Sinda/Fluint to do just that but it’s an expensive code to buy.</p>
<p>what’s your boundary conditions? Matlab with the normal fourier’s eq. on heat conduction should be solved numerically easily for a cylindrical rod in appropriate coordinates. </p>
<p>If you are chemE student, you should not “need” a simulation program. You write it, that’s what schooling is for.</p>
<p>I used Femlab (now COMSOL, I think) for one of my chemical engineering classes. </p>
<p>I remembered for one of my labs I had to modeling an impinging jet of air that cooled a heated brass rod that was also insulated in teflon. Good times. The simulation had quite the approximations though. Still, I had to find the steady state temperature profiles in the rod, teflon, and the air. What made it more complicated was that the fluid mechanics of the impinging air also had to be accounted for. </p>
<p>And of course, we had to do the transient analysis. I couldn’t figure out how to get physical results (T = 0 K ???), until I changed my initial conditions for the brass. </p>
<p>But really COMSOL is quite user friendly, though it is probably very expensive (my class had a license so that I could use it). And it does have an option to show a “movie” for temperature through time.</p>
<p>Maybe you should search the internet for open-source software for these numerical simulations. I remembered one time I stumbled across some. I think I might have searched for the term, “mesh,” “PDE solver” or something like that. I am sure that there is something good out there. Also good search terms would be “multiphysics modeling” or “finite difference/element methods”</p>
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<p>How about modeling a trapezoidal fin? I remembered one of my professors talking about this. One of the approximations was that the thickness of the fin was always a lot smaller than the other dimensions. The result was that the temperature profile was described by a modified Bessel function. Man, that was one crazy day in heat transfer!</p>
<p>Doesn’t look there’s much choice, I’ll go with Femlab then. I think my school has one.</p>
<p>We’re doing something smiliar to do that, but with a rod instead. The Dimensionless Biot number ells whether its ok to neglect temperature variation of the thickness of the fin. We’re doing the same thing but with a rod :)</p>