These are projects posted by the students of Dr. Gove Allen at Brigham Young University. These students have taken one semester-long course on VBA and generally have had no prior programming experience

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Numerical Heat Transfer Optimizations in VBA

For my masters project in mechanical engineering I created a numerical model for the heat transfer through a thermoelectric energy harvester for Boeing. I created the numerical routine in Matlab because that was the language I was familiar with. Had I known how to use VBA, I would have used it. For this project, I converted the Matlab code into an integrated VBA code using a function to calculate a thermal resistance using a numerical heat transfer model and Gauss-Seidel iterative solver. I next used a macro to run Solver to optimize the design of the energy harvester for maximum efficiency. The results from the design tool match my original Matlab, but the new design tool is much simpler and more elegant.

Excel File: http://files.gove.net/shares/files/10w/msz4/CompliantHarvesterModel.xlsm

Project Report: http://files.gove.net/shares/files/10w/msz4/Zabawa_FinalProject.pdf


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