Resolution of thermal energy transfer by diffusion and by convection / Resolução da transferência de energia térmica por difusão e por convecção

Abstract

Transfer of thermal energy is present all around us, it can be used to analyse systems such as our body, a launching rocket, a heating pan, refrigeration systems, engines and so on. A solid comprehension of how the thermal energy convection works in a simpler body is very important to guarantee a correct understanding and development of more complex real life engineering problems. The main subject of this paper is to study the transfer of thermal energy by diffusion and by convection and create an algorithm that can realize the simulation of this transfer of thermal energy in a bidimensional domain. To reach this goal, firstly was studied the physical model of the transfer of thermal energy. After that, the finite-difference numerical technique to spatial discretization was used to create the mesh of the body and two different methods - explicit and implicit - were used to discretize in time. To accomplish the numerical analysis, a Fortran90 algorithm was developed for each method in order to simulate the thermal energy transfer by diffusion and by convection given the boundaries conditions. Lastly, the results were quantitative validated by the manufactured method solution to ensure the code is functional. As a conclusion, the code showed up to be consistent, returning quantitative and qualitative validated results.