THE STEADY STATE AND TRANSIENT HEAT TRANSFER: A COMPUTER PROGRAM FOR THE PREDICTION OF TEMPERATURE DISTRIBUTION USING A FINITE DIFFERENCE METHOD

Abstract

The steady state and transient temperature distribution of an object is of vital importance to designers and engineers in the power engineering industry. A fast, accurate and economical means of obtaining the temperature distribution is therefore necessary. To this end, numerical simulation using a high speed digital computer and a suitable numerical scheme has found to be widely used. The project is primarily devoted to the development of a computer program for the heat transfer problems, involving all the three modes of heat transfer, viz. conduction, convection and radiation. Eight simple tests are deviced to validate the program and as far as possible, the predictions are always compared with analytical solutions. Attempt has been also made to compare the predictions with experimental results of a pool boiling problem. The comparions for all the cases studied show good agreement. Along with the computer program, a user instruction manual is also prepared.