Most thermal engineers will model and analyze thermal engineering cases, using any of the numerous thermal analysis software, available in the market. These commercial software need years of continuous use to be fully mastered. Large companies can afford to acquire expensive software available in the market and train their engineers; but small companies do not have the financial means to acquire such expensive software. Thus for modeling and analysis, small companies or private practice need a different alternative. Excel is one of the programs that come with Microsoft Office suite of software, which is installed on any purchased computer. Most users of Microsoft office are proficient in using Word, and can use Excel as a spread sheet to speed up calculations. Technical personnel can easily use the charting capability of Excel, but very few engineers can use Excel for intensive Numerical Analysis. Engineers should be able to use the available inexpensive Excel software to perform numerical analysis at their work place.
In this article three Heat Transfer Numerical cases using Microsoft Excel are discussed in detail. the first case is two dimensional steady state heat transfer with different isothermal boundary conditions. The second shows other boundary conditions: uniform heat flux, adiabatic, and convection. The third case is transient conditions. The results from the three cases are compared with results from Patran Thermal software.