Model predictive inverse method for recovering boundary conditions of two-dimensional ablation*

A model predictive inverse method (MPIM) is presented to estimate the time- and space-dependent heat flux on the ablated boundary and the ablation velocity of the two-dimensional ablation system. For the method, first of all, the relationship between the heat flux and the temperatures of the measurement points inside the ablation material is established by the predictive model based on an influence relationship matrix. Meanwhile, the estimation task is formulated as an inverse heat transfer problem (IHTP) with consideration of ablation, which is described by an objective function of the temperatures at the measurement point. Then, the rolling optimization is used to solve the IHTP to online estimate the unknown heat flux on the ablated boundary. Furthermore, the movement law of the ablated boundary is reconstructed according to the estimation of the boundary heat flux. The effects of the temperature measurement errors, the number of future time steps, and the arrangement of the measurement points on the estimation results are analyzed in numerical experiments. On the basis of the numerical results, the effectiveness of the presented method is clarified.