Estimation of heat flux on the surface of an initially hot cylinder cooled by a laminar confined impinging jet

In this study, an inverse algorithm based on the conjugate gradient method and the discrepancy principle is applied to estimate the unknown space-and time-dependent heat flux at the surface of an initially hot cylinder cooled by a laminar confined slot impinging jet from the knowledge of temperature measurements taken on the cylinder’s surface. It is assumed that no prior information is available on the functional form of the unknown heat flux; hence the procedure is classified as the function estimation in inverse calculation. The temperature data obtained from the direct problem are used to simulate the temperature measurements, and the effect of the errors in these measurements upon the precision of the estimated results is also considered. The results show that an excellent estimation on the space-and time-dependent heat flux can be obtained even the distributions of thermal properties inside the cylinder is unknown.