Inverse Heat Conduction Problem of Periodically Contacting Surfaces

An inverse heat conduction method for determining the periodically time-varying contact conductance between two periodically contacting surfaces is presented. The technique is based on solving two single-region inverse problems for the contact surface temperature and heat flux of each solid. The time variation of contact surface temperature is represented with a versatile periodic B-spline basis. The dimension of the B-spline basis is statistically optimized and confidence bounds are derived for the estimated contact conductance. Typical results based on both simulated and actual measurements are given and a parametric study is made to illustrate the general effects of measurement location, number of measurements, etc., on the accuracy of the results.