Flux Sim -- August 2014
Simulation Software Last Updated May 2024

About

Flux Sim is a thermal simulation program I wrote to test the Eigen matrix math library and the SFML graphics library.

The thermal dynamics are performed by iteratively solving a large spare matrix linking each neighboring cell(image pixel) to each other cell and equalizing the temperatures, simulating heat flow.

The physics and mathematical infrastructure for this program were derived from Nuclear Heat Transport by M. M. El-Wakil

Partially-equalized random thermal distribution
Partially-equalized random thermal distribution

Capabilities

Substantially-equalized random thermal distribution
Substantially-equalized random thermal distribution
Heat flow from a cold aluminum rectangle to hot walls
Heat flow from a cold aluminum rectangle to hot walls
This application accurately simulates the thermal transport over time within a piece of aluminum, although other materials can be added with material files which specify the material heat capacity at different temperatures.

Because this application simply simulates a massive 2D grid as a matrix, it was easy to add support for insulated points and fixed-temperature points.

Simulating additional geometry, while certainly possible, has not been experimented with.

Fixed-temperature points, evenly distributed throughout the simulation grid
Fixed-temperature points, evenly distributed throughout the simulation grid

Software

This program is written in platform-independent C++ code, but you'll have to source the libraries yourself and I have not tested Unix/OS X compilation.
The Windows executable can be downloaded here -- you'll also need the Visual Studio 2012 (32-bit) C++ redistributable.
The source code and assets can be downloaded here