DEVELOPMENT OF COMPUTATIONAL SOFTWARE FOR THERMAL ANALYSIS IN HETEROGENEOUS ANISOTROPIC MEDIA
Abstract
This paper presents the development and validation of a computational software package designed for the numerical simulation of transient heat transfer in heterogeneous, anisotropic media. Unlike isotropic materials, anisotropic media exhibit direction-dependent thermal conductivity, requiring a tensorial description. The proposed software, implemented in Python with NumPy and SciPy libraries, employs the finite volume method (FVM) on unstructured meshes, enabling complex geometries. The software architecture includes a preprocessor for material orientation definition, a solver using implicit time-stepping, and a postprocessor for 2D/3D visualization. Validation against analytical solutions and benchmark problems shows errors below 2%. The software is open-source and intended for educational and research applications in materials engineering and geophysics.