Numerical Solution of Heat Transfer by Conduction: Notes for Engineering Education

These notes were originally prepared during the 1999/2000 academic year to support the course "Heat and Mass Transfer II" of the Mechanical Engineering Degree at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), Lisbon. They have now been revised in the context of the "Integrating Project for the 1st Cycle in Mechanical Engineering" (LEMec21) to assist students in developing a Python-based numerical simulation for a heat conduction problem in a metal stamping process. The material covers the discretization of the heat conduction equation using the control volume method, time integration schemes (explicit, implicit, Crank-Nicolson), boundary condition treatment, and solution strategies for the resulting algebraic systems of equations. A complete Python implementation is also provided.