A FEASIBILITY STUDY OF EMPLOYING SEQUENTIAL FUNCTION SPECIFICATION METHOD FOR ESTIMATION OF TRANSIENT HEAT FLUX IN A NON-THERMAL EQUILIBRIUM POROUS CHANNEL

This paper is concerned with the inverse heat transfer between two parallel plates filled with a porous medium under a non-equilibrium condition. One of the difficulties in an inverse problem utilizing a non-thermal equilibrium model in porous media is the fact that it is not clear whether to assign the measured temperatures to a solid or fluid phase. A sequential function specification method (SFSM) is employed to estimate the transient wall heat flux imposed on the porous boundary. Effects of the future temperature data (r parameter) and sensor location on the estimated heat flux have been completely studied in the SFSM. The values of bias and variance errors have been calculated at sensor locations to obtain the optimum temperature measurements. Results show that sensor locations and existing errors in the measured data have important effects on the calculated heat flux; nonetheless, accurate heat flux estimation is quite achievable.