HEAT-CONDUCTION IN HETEROGENEOUS MATERIALS AND IRREGULAR BOUNDARIES .3. A COMPUTER-GRAPHICS BASED ALGORITHM FOR CALCULATING EFFECTIVE THERMAL PARAMETERS

In earlier papers [1-3] a simple and computationally fast method for i nvestigating heat conduction in materials of irregular shapes with het erogeneous thermal conductivity was presented. In that method, dubbed EPIC, the space is tesselated into cubical cell, an interfacial cells with regions of different thermal conductivities inside it is replaced by a cell with an effective uniform conductivity, and the heat conduc tion equation is solved numerically by using a finite difference metho d. In this paper, we present a novel computer graphics based approach to calculate effective conductivity which allows EPIC to be used for c omplex engineering systems generated by using standard CAD/CAM package s, bringing EPIC one step closer to becoming a practical tool.