The Numerical Method of Lines facilitates the instruction of unsteady heat conduction in simple solid bodies with convective surfaces

Abstract

The present study on engineering education addresses the Method of Lines and its variant the Numerical Method of Lines as a reliable avenue for the numerical analysis of one-dimensional unsteady heat conduction in walls, cylinders, and spheres involving surface convection interaction with a nearby fluid. The Method of Lines transforms the one-dimensional unsteady heat conduction equation in the spatial and time variables x, t into an adjoint system of first-order ordinary differential equations in the time variable t. Subsequently, the adjoint system of first-order ordinary differential equations is channeled through the Numerical Method of Lines and the powerful fourth-order Runge–Kutta algorithm. The numerical solution of the adjoint system of first-order ordinary differential equations can be carried out by heat transfer students employing appropriate routines embedded in the computer codes Maple, Mathematica, Matlab, and Polymath. For comparison, the baseline solutions used are the exact, analytical temperature distributions that are available in the heat conduction literature.