Numerical Methods for Heat Transfer Computations of Curved Surfaces Using Excel Techniques

The majority of engineers, at some point of their careers, will employ analysis and modeling to a certain degree of complexity. Excel is installed on most engineers' personal computers. Usually, engineers are competent in using Excel as a spreadsheet to speed up calculations, and are skilled in creating charts with Excel, but very few engineers can use Excel for Numerical Analysis and simulations. Excel is inexpensive unlike the numerous commercial thermal analysis software available in the market. Consequently, small companies and private consultants can find using Excel for basic simulations attractive. The author published an article in which three Heat Transfer Numerical cases using Microsoft Excel are discussed in detail [1]. Unfortunately, the three cases only address rectangular cross sections. The rectangular cases are easy to address since Excel elements are square. In engineering practice, many circular cross sections are encountered such as cylinders, pipes, rods, etc. In this article four Numerical Heat Transfer practical cases for circular cross sections using Microsoft Excel are introduced and discussed. Each case is solved with two different Excel methods and results are compared with analysis from Patran Thermal. The first case is a pipe with both internal and external surfaces are subjected to isothermal boundary conditions. The second case is a pipe insulated on the outside and isothermal boundary condition on the inside surface. The third case demonstrates the implementation of uniform heat flux to the exterior surface and convection on the interior surface. Finally, the last case is transient conduction with isothermal boundary conditions on both internal and external surfaces of the tube. The details of the simulations and results are discussed in this article.