How can I create a segmented contour plot?

I solved a 1D moving boundary heat transfer problem and I want to recreate something like the graphs on the left in this image. Anyone know how I can do that?

[jonas]

The left graphs are not good in my opinion. They should not have smooth colorbars, falsely indicating step-wise changes in temperature.

What type of data do you have? Did you try contourf?

[Christine Lynch]

Hey thanks for your help!

Well it's a 1d ice cube, so I solved for the temperature at each discretization point

---------Temp ---------Temp ---------Temp ---------Temp

and so on. I tried contourf and got something that didn't make sense but I also don't use it very much so maybe I didn't know how to plot it properly?

Say at time step 1: I have 5 temperatures which I solved for in addition to the temperatures on the boundaries. I also have their positions in the x-axis. So what I did is I concatenated those vectors and did contourf on that but it didn't work :/

Z = [temps positions] contourf(Z)

I have attached what I got.

Answer 1

[jonas]

Looks like you actually have a 2D data set but want to plot in 3D, which means you have to add an arbitrary 'depth'. This will give you a color-figure that is more difficult to interpret than a normal 2D-plot. Nevertheless, I've made a small example, with result attached.

%%Create data
x=0:180;
z=-sind(x);
figure;
subplot(1,3,1)
plot(x,z)
axis tight

%%Extrude to a width of 10 and plot
subplot(1,3,2)
y=1:10;
z2=repmat(z,numel(y),1);
contourf(x,y,z2)
subplot(1,3,3)
surf(x,y,z2,'edgecolor','none')
colorbar

Note: Surf and contourf will connect the data linearly. If you want a more correct shape of the temperature distribution, then you have to either solve for more points or apply another interpolation method prior to plotting (using e.g. meshgrid & griddata).

[Christine Lynch]

Thanks Jonas. I'll try this as well.

I actually did try the meshgrid method last night and because I don't entirely understand it, I ended up playing around with the inputs to that and contourf and finally was able to get the plot I wanted by making sure that the Z matrix was just a repeat of the temperature data.

I'll have to study those two functions to actually understand why that worked. I'll also try your method.

Thanks again for your help!!