Inverse Heat Conduction of Contacting Surfaces

The problem of contacting surfaces involving the estimation of thermal contact conductance has different practical applications especially in thermal supervision of space vehicles. An inverse heat conduction problem for estimating the thermal contact conductance between one-dimensional, constant property contacting solids has been investigated with Conjugate Gradient Method (CGM) of Function Estimation-which converges very rapidly and is not so sensitive to the measurement errors-and under quasi-steady state condition. Two general classes of results-the results obtained by applying exact and inexact simulated measured data-are presented. Generally, the present method effectively recovers the assumed exact thermal contact conductance when exact and inexact simulated measurements are input to the analysis. Furthermore, the results obtained with CGM are in good agreement with the exact thermal contact conductance even when simulated measured data with large standard deviation of measurement errors are applied to the analysis.