Mechanics

Introduction¶General goal¶The design of a camping van involves an estimation of the heat losses that will lead to the subsequent design of both the insulation and the heating system. This study will aim at evaluating the average heat flux through the van surfaces in steady mode. Tools of the trade¶For that matter, we will use mostly Numpy, the scientific computing module for vector and matrice algebra in Python. As a wrapper for Numpy, we will use the package Pandas which offers a nice way to index rows and columns of Numpy arrays,like an abstraction of a spreadsheet, with SQL-like tools to get, mask and insert data.
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A few weeks ago, I discovered the tiny world of tiny houses and camping-vans and found that quite amazing. However, the current commercial camping vans look pretty sub-optimal to me, because they are equipped with kitchen-style furniture, meaning heavy, stand-alone stuff made of chipwood/OSB panels 1.5 cm thick. See for yourself : I spent 3 years working at Polytechnique Montreal on a 280 kg solar car made of carbon fiber, fiberglass and epoxy, and embedding 6 m² of solar panels on the top shell, so, seeing such a daddy’s design add around 750 kg of equipement on top of a 6 m² cargo van blew my mind in a bad way.
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