File Exchange Pick of the Week

October 26th, 2012

GUI 2D Heat Transfer

Will's pick this week is GUI 2D Heat Transfer by Dominik Gibala.

Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, I was an aerospace engineering undergraduate. Back then, the classes I excelled most at were Statics, Solid Mechanics, Thermodynamics, and Heat Transfer. I even spent a year researching particle agglomeration in a combustion research group. Strange then that I chose a life of avionics and control design rather than one of finite element analysis.

Despite my chosen career path, heat transfer has always held a special place in my heart. And since I'm also a big fan of MATLAB GUIs, I was left with little choice but to select Dominik's work when I came across it. He has created a MATLAB App that displays the time-varying temperature of a square plate. Each edge of the plate has a fixed, user-specified temperature. This causes the plate to heat or cool from its initial condition.

GUI options

Once you set up your problem and push Run, it's kind of like you have a little lava lamp on your desk. I ran various experiments and found the following results particularly intriguing:
The Crosshatch

Fun as this is, there's still room for improvement in this submission. Here are some suggestions I have to make this App even better!

Enable the user to control the time step.
Enable the user to control the color map.
Lock the color bar's range at the beginning of simulation to the min/max temperatures.
Change the name of the files and GUI from Czech to English :).
Solve the intermittent crash that occurs when the variable t gets cleared.
Scale the axes to match the user-specified edge length rather than the number of points.

I leave the challenge to our readers.

Comments
Let us know what you think here or leave a comment for Dominik.

By Will Campbell

Will is an application engineer at MathWorks. Though an avid MATLAB fan, he typically supports users of Simulink within the aerospace industry. His favorite science text is Lectures on Physics by Feynman.

08:53 UTC | Posted in GUI or GUIDE, Picks | Permalink | 3 Comments »

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3 Responses to “GUI 2D Heat Transfer”

Peter replied on October 29th, 2012 at 00:02 UTC :

I’d love to see the ability to put functions of t (or time) as the wall temperatures. Then you can model things heating up/cooling down, or even sinusoidal stuff, or more!
ali replied on November 3rd, 2012 at 14:17 UTC :

hi….tnx
Dhanaraj Dinesh replied on November 22nd, 2012 at 10:40 UTC :

very good