Application Of The Studio Model To Teaching Heat Transfer

Over the past five years we have transformed our undergraduate heat transfer course from a strictly lecture format (with an associated lab the following semester) by replacing one lecture a week with a two-hour “studio” session. These sessions are held in a classroom equipped with a computer for each pair of students. Much of the studio work revolves around a set of locally developed, research-based numerical algorithms that solve in real time the governing ordinary and partial-differential equations describing heat and fluid flow. Several of the modules may be considered “virtual” laboratories, that is, they allow students to take data from the computer screen for post-processing much as if they were working in a real, extremely well-equipped laboratory. Others give the option of performing dozens of "what if” calculations rapidly, thus inviting their use in the design process. Some merely replace the table and chart lookups that are so commonly used in the study and practice of heat transfer. In the studio projects, students are exposed to modern computational techniques while seeing them applied to fundamental problems. With the complete field solution available from the numerical model and not just a “bottom-line” result, most of the modules are designed to be visually rich, and thus allow the students to understand the physics behind the often-confusing convection correlations. Since many of the problems we work on do have analytical solutions, they gain experience in the verification of results. In several projects students are exposed to spreadsheet programming using macros. For a number of these modules we have developed an accompanying desktop experiment to enhance still further the hands-on nature of the studio and to allow comparison with our numerical models.