A novel solution for inverse heat conduction problem in one-dimensional medium with moving boundary and temperature-dependent material properties

• A novel approach for solving IHCP in 1D medium with moving boundary is developed. • The proposed approach is based on interpolation of filter coefficients. • The developed approach accounts for temperature dependent material properties. • Temperature data from interior locations are used for surface heat flux estimation. • The approach is computationally efficient and operates in a near real-time fashion. A novel approach for solving inverse heat conduction problems in one-dimensional domain with moving boundary and temperature dependent material properties is presented. In this study, it is assumed that two thermocouples are used to measure temperature at two interior locations within the medium while the front boundary experiences recession (moving towards the back surface). A filter coefficient-form Tikhonov regularization method is used to develop the solution for this problem. It is hypothesized that interpolation of pre-calculated filter coefficients for a medium with various thickness values can be used to calculate the filter coefficients for an IHCP with moving boundary, knowing the current thickness of the domain. This can be used along with interpolation among the pre-calculated filter coefficients at different temperatures, knowing the temperature value, to find the correct filter coefficients at each time step and accurately estimate the conducted heat flux in a near real-time fashion. The hypothesis is then validated through several numerical test cases developed in COMSOL. It is shown that the proposed solution method can accurately estimate the conducted heat flux in a domain with a moving boundary in a near real-time fashion. The main advantage of the proposed solution is in it's computationally efficient nature as well as possibility of implementation for monitoring and control purposes due to the near real-time operation of the method. The developed method can be used for calculating surface heat flux in applications that involves moving boundary and large temperature variations such as ablative thermal protection systems for space vehicles.