Transient surface heating rates from a nickel film sensor using inverse analysis (Q631191)

A numerical method is discussed based on the inverse analysis of the transient one-dimensional heat conduction equation from the experimentally measured temperature history during a supersonic flight test. Inverse methods are used to infer the surface heat flux from the transient temperature data obtained from a nickel film sensor mounted on a quartz substrate. The experimental temperature data are discretized using the cubic-spline method to obtain the closed form solution which is utilized for inverse analysis. The inverse problem is solved analytically as well as control volume approximation and compared with that of standard benchmark results with thin film gauge analysis based on semi-infinite one dimensional medium. The effect of sensor thickness on surface heat flux results is investigated during the numerical simulation. It has been observed that when the thickness of the film is very small compared to substrate thickness, no significant difference is noticed in the heat flux as well as temperature histories in both approaches (i.e., thin film as well as inverse method). However, an increase in sensor thickness to 100 times results in a 20\% increase in the peak surface heat flux. Numerical results for this representative problem show that the heat flux can be predicted well by both thin and thick film analysis. For inverse methods, heat balance equations based on control volume are relatively easy and reduce the computational time compared to that of analytical solutions.