Heat conduction in heterogeneous materials and irregular boundaries III: A computer graphics based algorithm for calculating effective thermal parameters

In earlier papers 1–3] a simple and computationally fast method for investigating heat conduction in materials of irregular shapes with heterogeneous 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 conduction equation is solved numerically by using a finite difference method. In this paper, we present a novel computer graphics based approach to calculate effective conductivity which allows EPIC to be used for complex engineering systems generated by using standard CAD/CAM packages, bringing EPIC one step closer to becoming a practical tool.