Inverse Heat Transfer Problem of Thermal Contact Conductance Estimation in Periodically Contacting Surfaces

The problems involving periodic contacting surfaces have different practical applications. An inverse heat conduction problem for estimating the periodic Thermal Contact Conductance (TCC) between one-dimensional, constant property contacting solids has been investigated with conjugate gradient method (CGM) of function estimation. This method converges very rapidly and is not so sensitive to the measurement errors. The advantage of the present method is that no a priori information is needed on the variation of the unknown quantities, since the solution automatically determines the functional form over the specified domain. A simple, straight forward technique is utilized to solve the direct, sensitivity and adjoint problems, in order to overcome the difficulties associated with numerical methods. Two general classes of results, the results obtained by applying inexact simulated measured data and the results obtained by using data taken from an actual experiment are presented. In addition, extrapolation method is applied to obtain actual results. Generally, the present method effectively improves the exact TCC when exact and inexact simulated measurements input to the analysis. Furthermore, the results obtained with CGM and the extrapolation results are in agreement and the little deviations can be negligible.