Simultaneous estimation of heat flux and heat transfer coefficient in irregular geometries made of functionally graded materials

A numerical inverse analysis based on explicit sensitivity coefficients is developed for the simultaneous estimation of heat flux and heat transfer coefficient imposed on different parts of boundary of a general irregular heat conducting body made of functionally graded materials with spatially varying thermal conductivity. It is assumed that the thermal conductivity varies exponentially with position in the body. The body considered in this study is an eccentric hollow cylinder. The heat flux is applied on the cylinder inner surface and the heat is dissipated to the surroundings through the outer surface. The numerical method used in this study consists of three steps: 1) to apply a boundary-fitted grid generation (elliptic) method to generate grid over eccentric hollow cylinder (an irregular shape) and then solve for the steady-state heat conduction equation with variable thermal conductivity to compute the temperature values in the cylinder, 2) to propose a new explicit sensitivity analysis scheme used in inverse analysis, and 3) to apply a gradient-based optimization method (in this study, conjugate gradient method) to minimize the mismatch between the computed temperature on the outer surface of the cylinder and simulated measured temperature distribution. The inverse analysis presented here is not involved with an adjoint equation and all the sensitivity coefficients can be computed in only one direct solution, without the need for the solution of the adjoint equation. The accuracy, efficiency, and robustness of the developed inverse analysis are demonstrated through presenting a test case with different initial guesses.