Contact heat transfer analysis between mechanical surfaces based on reverse engineering and FEM

In engineering application, analyzing the temperature field of structures is often necessary. The contact surface is constituted by the superposition of different scales of rough surfaces because it is not completely smooth. When heat is transferred between these two contact surfaces, the surfaces are in incomplete contact, and a temperature difference is formed on the contact surface. The non -smooth contact surface also delays the thermal equilibrium time in numerical simulation. In this paper, the W-M fractal function is used to reconstruct the rough surface of the experimental plate according to its profile parameters, then the nonuniform B-spline global surface interpolation method is used to aid the construction of a 3D surface that could keep the true shape of the plate to the greatest extent, and the 3D rough surface with the same size as the experimental plate is reconstructed by reverse engineering. Finally, the heat transfer characteristics of non-smooth contact are simulated and analyzed by using the finite element method, and verified by experiments. Experimental and simulation results show that the actual contact area of the plate is about 7.09% of the nominal contact area. The research method in this paper can be utilized to study not only the heat conduction characteristics of the contact surface but also engineering problems such as friction and wear of the contact surfaces.