An inverse heat conduction problem of estimating boundary fluxes in an irregular domain with conjugate gradient method

A Boundary Element Method (BEM)-based inverse algorithm utilizing the iterative regularization method, i.e. the Conjugate Gradient Method (CGM), is used to solve the Inverse Heat Conduction Problem (IHCP) of estimating the unknown transient boundary heat flux in a multi-dimensional domain with arbitrary geometry. Results show that the advantages of applying the CGM in the inverse calculations lie in that the major difficulties in (i) choosing a suitable quadratic norm, (ii) determining a proper regularization order and (iii) determining the optimal smoothing (or regularization) coefficient in the conventional Regularization Method (RM) are avoided. Received on 27 October 1997