INVERSE FORCED CONVECTION PROBLEM OF SIMULTANEOUS ESTIMATION OF TWO BOUNDARY HEAT FLUXES IN IRREGULARLY SHAPED CHANNELS

This article deals with the use of the conjugate gradient method of function estimation for the simultaneous identification of two unknown boundary heat fluxes in channels with laminar flows. The irregularly shaped channel in the physical domain is transformed into a parallel plate channel in the computational domain by using an elliptic scheme of numerical grid generation. The direct problem, as well as the auxiliary problems and the gradient equations, required for the solution of the inverse problem with the conjugate gradient method are formulated in terms of generalized boundary-fitted coordinates. Therefore, the solution approach presented here can be readily applied to forced convection boundary inverse problems in channels of any shape. Direct and auxiliary problems are solved with finite volumes. The numerical solution for the direct problem is validated by comparing the results obtained here with benchmark solutions for smoothly expanding channels. Simulated temperature measurements containing random errors are used in the inverse analysis for strict cases involving functional forms with discontinuities and sharp corners for the unknown functions. The estimation of three different types of inverse problems are addressed in the paper: (i) time-dependent heat fluxes; (ii) spatially dependent heat fluxes; and (iii) time and spatially dependent heat fluxes.