A Matlab Program For Teaching Convective Heat Transfer

Certainly, a key element to students’ learning in engineering is the practice gained in working problems. The challenge for the instructor is in providing good problems that adequately challenge the student, but that do not go stale. A MATLAB program has been developed that will generate an infinite number of different convective heat transfer problems, prompt the student for an answer, check the answer, return the correct answer to the student, and track the student’s performance. All interactions between the student and the program are through graphical user interfaces that have been developed using the guide function in MATLAB. The program begins by randomly generating a convective heat transfer problem. This is accomplished by using the Nusselt number classification scheme of Somerton et al [1], the following conditions are randomly decided: