STUDY OF HEAT DIFFUSION IN A DISCRETE TWO-DIMENSIONAL PLATE BY FINITE DIFFERENCES WITH OPEN CODIGE IMPLEMENTATION

Abstract

The way to study transport phenomena and engineering situations can be experimental, analytical or numerical. In the last few decades, computer simulations have stood out in practically all areas of engineering. This is due to the development of new products and processes, seeking to reduce costs, time and resources consumed in tests and experimental tests, which can be minimized with the use of numerical simulations. This is often applied in heat transfer and fluid mechanics, the result of which comes from a solution of differential equations (or systems). Among the numerical methods used, there are finite elements, finite volumes and finite differences that naturally present different degrees of complexity. The finite difference method requires less computational effort and can be useful in simple problems. Thus, finite differences are the proposition presented in this work associated with a heat diffusion problem in a flat plate, in a two-dimensional domain. The objective is the implementation in open code through Octave free software, verifying with the analytical solution from the literature, the simplicity of the application and the reach of the convergence condition are proven.