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Heat Flow in Inhomogeneous Materials

2024-05-06 by Fritz Crusius

Project means to fill a gap in publications solving elliptic PDEs in steady state without heat generation. Finite-difference examples I found assumed homogeneous materials, whereas the challenge in civil engineering is to model thermal bridge effects of component inhomogeneities.

This project serves as as compendium to a German blog article on heat bridges https://energieoekonom.de/waermeleitung-finite-difference/.

Minimal System

minimal_system.py

The minimal system example reflects the explanation of setting up a finite-difference system of linear equations, and solving it for node temperatures.

Verification System

verification_system.py

For verification of correctness and accuracy of results, a comparison of simulated and theoretical values across a wall of 10 cm thickness consisting of two layers of 4 cm of solid brick and an in between insulation layer of 2 cm polyurethane.

This project also demonstrates how heat conductivities reflected in a finite-difference-grid should be scaled to take account of the actual dimensions of a modeled component. Furthermore, the project shows how to model the inner room and outer environment air.

2D-Material from PNG Image System

png_model_2d.py

Creates a heat conductivity map from an input PNG grayscale image and a mapping CSV file, giving luminosities a heat conductivity. Was used to create the cross-section2.*.png result images.

Images in root directory were created using the following command line:

png_model_2d.py -pixel_step 10 cross_sections/cross-section2.png

For the low resolution gradient field image, a wider pixel step of 50 was used:

png_model_2d.py -pixel_step 50 cross_sections/cross-section2.png