Three-dimensional transient inverse heat conduction problems in the enhanced pool boiling heat transfer

In this paper, the solution methods of three-dimensional transient inverse heat conduction problems (3D IHCP) arising from pool boiling applications that need to reconstruct Neumann boundary conditions are summarized. Due to their mathematical ill-posedness, it is still non-trivial to solve these 3D IHCP at a reasonable cost. Firstly, we introduce the optimization-based regularization methods, such as Tikhonov regularization and iterative regularization. In general, it requires to solve a large number of optimization problems constrained by 3D partial differential equations (PDE). In this case, an improved Tikhonov regularization method is developed to quickly obtain optimal Tikhonov regularization parameter and thereby can accelerate the entire inverse calculation process. Furthermore, an iterative regularization method that is based on the conjugate gradient method is proposed to handle the high-resolution measurement data and many pointwise measurement data. In pool boiling experiments, they can be obtained by an infrared camera and mirco-thermocouples, respectively. Secondly, a completely different approach, a direct two-step strategy is presented to solve the same 3D transient ICHP on thin-plates that commonly occur in engineering applications. The main idea of the approach is to transform the inverse problem into a forward problem that is easier to solve by replacing the unknown Neumann boundary condition with an approximated Dirichlet boundary condition. The method has great advantage in efficiency compared with the optimization-based method that often requires to solve dozens or hundreds of direct, adjoint and sensitivity PDE problems, and therefore has the potential to be developed as efficient online heat-flux soft sensors for many practical applications. Thirdly, to further speed up the numerical solution procedure we develop a time-space dependent adaptive mesh refinement strategy due to the fact that the heat-flux and temperature dynamics related to bubble structures rapidly change in space and time on the boiling surface. A few classical engineering benchmark problems are considered to validate the aforementioned solution approaches, and the proposed approaches are also successfully applied to reconstruct the transient heat-flux distributions on the boiling surface from the noisy experimental data obtained in a series of real pool boiling experiments along the entire boiling curve. On the one hand, the corresponding research works reviewed can be used to explore the heat-transfer mechanism and establish a more accurate heat transfer model enabling the fast, robust and accurate reconstruction of local heat fluxes, which can be considered as realistic boundary conditions on the boiling surface to further study the two-phase flow and heat transfer process of boiling fluid above the heater. On the other hand, it can be also applied to explore the local details of the enhanced pool boiling heat transfer for the design of new heaters such as micro/nano structured surfaces, provide predictions related to the boiling process and conduct optimal experimental design in a systematic way. In the future work, a large number of 3D IHCP for different test regularization parameters will be calculated through a high-throughput parallel computational strategy. Besides, for thick heaters the direct two-step strategy can be used to solve the 3D ICHP accurately with an initial heat-flux guess obtained by the proposed optimization-based inversion approach. This way, the computational efficiency can be further improved. Furthermore, other new inversion methods, for example, which are based on artificial neural network method are being developed to solve 3D transient IHCP for more complex structured heater surfaces such as the micro/nano structures.