Estimation of unknown heat source function in inverse heat conduction problems using quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization

The estimation of temporal dependent heat source in transient heat conduction problem is investigated. A stochastic method known as quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization (QPSO) is used to estimate the heat source without a priori information on its functional form, which is classified as the function estimation by inverse calculation. Because of the ill-posedness of this kind of inverse problems, Tikhonov regularization method is applied in this paper to stabilize the solution. Numerical experiments indicate the validity and stability of the QPSO method. Comparison with the conjugate gradient method (CGM) is also presented in this paper.