Inverse analysis of thermal conductivities in transient non-homogeneous and non-linear heat conductions using BEM based on complex variable differentiation method

This paper presents a new inverse analysis approach to sensitivity analysis and material property identification in transient non-homogeneous and non-linear heat conduction Boundary Element Method (BEM) analysis based on Complex Variable Differentiation Method (CVDM). In this approach, the material properties are taken as the optimization variables, and the sensitivity coefficients are computed by CVDM. The advantages of using CVDM are that the computation of partial derivatives of an implicit function is reduced to function calculation in a complex domain, and the parameter sensitivity coefficients can be determined in a more accurate way than the traditional Finite Difference Method (FDM). Based on BEM and CVDM in evaluation of the sensitivity matrix of heat flux, the parameter such as thermal conductivity can be accurately identified. Six numerical examples are given to demonstrate the potential of the proposed approach. The results indicate that the presented method is efficient for identifying the thermal conductivity with single or multiple parameters.