Engineering students typically find numerical methods like FDM and FEA hard to visualise. This app was conceived to allow students to just play with the parameters for the heat equation on a plane, and watch the effect on the solution immediately. Initally a Mechanical Engineering Honours thesis project, it has since been adopted into the University of Sydney's Introductory Numerical Methods course.
This project made use of MATLAB to code and verify custom direct solvers for steady-state heat distribution in arbitrary 3D solids discretised into unstructured tetrahedral mesh. A stegosaurus model gives a fun demonstration of just how arbitrary the solid can be, in addition to the usual verification geometries.
A landholder in Sydney's west wanted some insight into changes to major flooding extents if a weir on a 160ha property were removed. Using publicly available LIDAR data and ANU's shallow water equation package ANUGA, floods of various heights were simulated, with existing and altered topography. Results suggested that dry land gains could be expected to be minimal at best.