Matlab Modeling and FEM Simulation of Resistive Heating in a Incandescent Bulb Wire Filament

The linked post discusses multiphysics modeling of resistive Joule heating simulated with the FEATool Multiphysics Finite Element FEM toolbox for GNU Octave and Matlab. In the model the resulting current from an applied electric potential will heat a thin spiral shaped Tungsten wire, such as can be found in incandescent light bulbs. After the start up phase the filament reaches an equilibrium temperature where the internal heat generation is balanced by radiative heat loss through the boundaries.

Although the model could quite easily be implemented in the FEATool GUI, since it features a one way multiphysics coupling it will be shown how the dependent variables and equations can be decoupled and implemented as a Matlab m-script file to save computational time.

Please visit this FEATool Multiphysics Blog Tutorial to see how to set up and simulate this physics problem in Matlab.