Estimation of surface heat flux for highly dynamical heat diffusion system related to atmospheric re-entry of aerospace vehicles

Motivated by an inverse dynamic heat flux analysis during atmospheric re-entry of aerospace vehicles, this paper is concerned with the numerical identification of boundary parameters in a heat diffusion system. First, a time-dependent heat diffusion system with unknown boundary parameters is formulated as output least square problems with the Dirichlet boundary data. Next, a finite element method is used to approximate the minimization problem with the equalities constraints. Numerical experiments are presented to show the efficacy of the proposed estimation algorithm.