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Simultaneous inverse identification of the temperature-dependent volumetric heat capacity and thermal conductivity of a solid material based on transient temperature histories was studied. The inverse problem was defined according to the evaluation of the BICOND thermophysical property measurement method. The material property functions were defined by several data points with linear interpolation between them. In this way, no previous information is needed about the expected temperature dependency of the material property functions. The inverse problem was solved by a real-valued genetic algorithm using simulated measurement results. New genetic operators (smooth initialization and smooth mutation) were developed and applied. The accuracy of the inverse solution was studied in two test cases including linear, square, and sinusoidal functions. The effects of regularization and random noise in the temperature histories were also analyzed. Based on the results, the proposed method is likely to be effective in evaluation of real measured temperature histories to simultaneously determine temperature-dependent thermophysical properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: An artificial neural network based solution of the inverse heat conduction problem of simultaneous identification of the temperature-dependent volumetric heat capacity and thermal conductivity function of a solid material is presented in this paper. The inverse problem was defined according to the evaluation of the BICOND thermophysical property measurement method. The volumetric heat capacity and thermal conductivity vs. temperature functions are to be determined using the measured transient temperature histories of two sensors. In this study noiseless and noisy artificial measurements were generated by the numerical solution of the corresponding direct heat conduction problem. The inverse problem was solved by multi-layer feed-forward neural network trained by back-propagation algorithm (BP) and radial basis function (RBF) type neural network applying the whole history mapping approach. As suggested by Czél et al. [1], a novel (time vs. temperature) representation of the input data was applied. Numerical tests were performed to analyze the accuracy of the two network types with noiseless and noisy inputs. Moreover, it is not necessary to retrain the network when the temperature range of the measurement is changed. Based on the presented results it can be stated that feed-forward neural networks are powerful tools in non-iterative solution of function estimation inverse heat conduction problems and they are likely to be very effective in evaluation of real measured temperature histories to simultaneously determine the volumetric heat capacity and thermal conductivity as an arbitrary function of temperature. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]