Heat transfer occurs everywhere, be it our daily lives or modern industry. To engineers who design and improve every aspect of our life, heat acts as a double-edged sword. It’s an energy source that people have been using since ancient times. It still provides us with hot food, warm environments, electric power, and much more. However, heat also has negative aspects. In the pursuit of faster speed and larger power in our computerized electronic age, heat is an undesired by-product. Therefore, it’s extremely important for an engineer to understand the mechanism of heat transfer to appropriately utilize heat and control its effects on structural systems.
Foundations of Heat Transfer in Structures
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Innovation Course
Intro to Heat Transfer in Mechanical Structures
Heat transfer, or the study of the temperature distribution in structures, plays an important role in almost any engineering system. From small devices such as smartphones to large gas turbines, understanding and controlling heat can improve the performance and reliability of engineered ...Read more
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Innovation Course
Thermal Conductivity in Mechanical Structures
Heating up a steel bar from one end and holding the other end in hand, you will soon feel the increased temperature. This indicates one of the heat transfer mode, thermal conduction. Thermal conduction transfers heat energy by collision of particles...Read more
3
Innovation Course
Thermal Capacitance in Mechanical Structures
Thermal capacitance describes the capacity of a material to store heat energy. It is often viewed as the analogy of material mass in transient structural analysis. Transient analysis means analyzing a system in unsteady-state: a state varies with respect to time. A ...Read more
4
Innovation Course
Thermal Convection in Mechanical Structures
If you have an air conditioner in a house, how does the entire space get heated up or cooled down by this machine? The answer is convection. Convection transfers heat within fluids (liquids and gases) through a complex process that combines advection and diffusion. I...Read more
5
Innovation Course
Thermal Radiation in Mechanical Structures
Radiation is one of the three heat transfer modes. Different from conduction and convection, radiation does not require substances as media between the heat source and the heated object. At the molecular level, radiation transforms heat energy by electromagnetic waves. As lon...Read more
