Abstract
In general heat transfer, which is the science that studies the rate of energy transfer, has an extensive working area ranging from biological systems to common household appliances, industrial processes, electronic devices, among others. For engineers, it is necessary to have a complete understanding of this phenomena to design the best equipment that gives the highest efficiency and save the maximum energy possible. Most of the study about heat transfer is addressed to the steady state because systems remain in that state most of the time. However, there are always perturbations that cause variability on the systems producing complications that require immediate attention by the implementation of control of processes. For that reason, it is necessary to know the dynamic behavior of the systems by understanding their transient state. In heat transfer, these systems are designed with different shapes that can be sectioned and studied separately with the use of the common configurations such as walls, cylinder, and spheres. In this article, it is presented a parametric study of Transient heat transfer processes which often involve the use of partial differential equations that normally require rigorous computational tools, and their analytical solutions require severe mathematical methods. With the help of an easy to use Graphical User Interface (GUI) developed in Matlab, three case studies will be presented for common geometrical configurations typical of a heat transfer course. It was found the temperature profile in a transient state for cylinders, walls, and spheres using numerical methods of solutions, and the temperature as a function of the convective heat transfer coefficient for the same configurations. It will be shown the effect of the convection on the loss of heat of walls, cylinders, and spheres with the same volume as a function of time.
