The analogy between thermal and electrical systems allows the engineer to utilize the widely known basic laws such as Ohm's Law and Kirchhoff's Laws used for balancing networks. Numerical techniques such as finite differencing , are used to solve the partial differential equations describing such systems. TAK 2000 has been developed around such techniques. It enables engineers to readily compute temperature distributions and gradients of very complex thermal networks. An arithmetic node can be used to represent the surface of a material.
Arithmetic nodes have no thermal capacitance.
They are sometimes called steady state nodes. Their temperatures are calculated by being brought into a steady state heat balance with the neighboring nodes. It can be used to represent nodes with very small capacitance relative to the rest of the model. In a transient analysis, this could result in a significant reduction in computer run time with only minor changes in overall accuracy. A blackbody is not necessarily black.