TRfem

Rhino plugin · v0.2.9181.2067 · updated 9/26/2026

An easy-to-use validated heat transfer solver on tetrahedral meshes, for energy engineering in Rhino3D 8 and 9 on Windows 10 or 11 or Mac, Rhino version 8.15 and above. Unlike other plugins for energy efficiency analysis, TRfem works fully volumetrically on a 3D tetrahedral mesh, and is extremely easy to use. Includes a tet mesh previewer, and example tet mesh, a cube tet mesh provide, and an isosurface solver. This is a companion plugin to TRmesh for tetrahedral meshing, but TRfem includes a number of tet meshing components that will usually suffice for real-world tasks. The main solver component takes the following inputs: - A Rhino quad mesh with each quad representing a tetrahedron. - A list of tetrahedral references. At index j, it indicates the material that tetrahedron j belongs to. These are indices into the next parameter, the conductivities. If unsure, just provide {0} here and {1.0} for the conductivities. - A list of conductivities. At index i, it contains the conductivity of material i,in Watt per meter and Kelvin. Typical value is 0.02 for insulation foam, and 2 for concrete. Length of the list is the number of different materials your tetrahedral mesh consists of. If unsure, just provide {1.0}, standing for one material of conductivity 1.0. If there is only one material, the value has no influence on the result, as expected. - A list of vertex indices that are hot, for instance exposed to interior heated air. These are the heat sources. - A list of vertex indices that are cold, for instance exposed to exterior cold air. These are the heat sinks. The resulting temperature field will have a gradient that goes from the cold to the hot vertices. Note that all other vertices are supposed to be exposed to a good insulator, for instance air that is not convective, such as air between walls. The resulting temperature field will have a gradient perpendicular to those boundary vertices, corresponding to absence of heat transfer in and out of these boundary patches. This is in accordance with the definition of a thermal bridge: "A structural component with much higher conductivity than the surrounding components". We therefore model the surrounding components as not receiving or emitting heat transfer at all. The algorithm and implementation was reviewed and published in https://doi.org/10.3390/encyclopedia2020067. TRfem is fully EN ISO 10211:2017 and 10077:2017 compliant. Icons thanks to https://flaticon.com under attribution license.

Total downloads

1,331

Recent downloads

+131 / week+230 in the last month

Latest version

v0.2.9181.20679/26/2026

Releases

22every ~42d

First released

5/2/2024

Download size

19 MB

License

Not declared

Authors

Mathias Fuchs

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