Boundary shape determination of steady-state heat-conduction fields

In this paper, a practical method of numerical analysis for the boundary shape design of steady-state heat-conduction fields to control the temperature distribution to a prescribed distribution is presented. Reshaping was accomplished by the traction method proposed by one of the authors as a solution to domain optimization problems in which elliptic boundary value problems were defined. In this study, we formulated a temperature square error norm minimization problem between the prescribed distribution and the actual distribution on prescribed boundaries and theoretically derived a shape gradient function for this problem. We developed a convenient numerical method using a general-purpose FEM program for the temperature prescribed problem. The successful results for the two-dimensional problems of an erosion surface on a blast furnace hearth and a coolant flow passage in a wing demonstrate the validity of the presented method. © 2001 Scripta Technica, Heat Trans Asian Res, 30(3): 245–258, 2001