A comprehensive experimental and numerical estimation of thermal contact conductance
Authors :- Meet Parikh, Sanil Shah, Harsh Vaghela, Ajit Kumar Parwani
Publication :- International Journal of Thermal Sciences, Volume 172, Part A, February 2022, 107285
Realizing perfect contact between any two surfaces is impossible due to the presence of microscopic irregularities in material surfaces. Therefore, for true thermal analysis of multiple components systems knowledge of thermal contact conductance (TCC) between two solid bodies is essential. Estimation of TCC for different applications has been carried out in this paper by inverse heat transfer technique. A novel stochastic Jaya algorithm has been developed for this purpose and its performance has been evaluated for different heat conduction problems like the estimation of TCC with two metals contact (case-1), periodically contacting surfaces (case-2), multilayer wall surfaces (case-3), and simultaneous estimation of TCC and boundary heat flux (case-4). The experiment has also been conducted to determine the efficacy of this new algorithm for real-life situations. Different parameters like population size, sensor location from the interface, and errors in measured temperature data are taken into consideration. The population size of 5 candidate solutions for case-1, 60 candidate solutions for case-2, and 50 candidate solutions for case-3 and case-4 is found to be suitable for estimation. The results are accurate with the root mean square (RMS) error of 12.62 W/m2K even when the sensors are located 50 mm far away from the interface. Although errors in measurements deteriorate the performance of the Jaya algorithm, it still gives stable results (RMS = 2.90 W/m2K at σ = 0.3). Jaya algorithm is found to be an accurate and promising algorithm for inverse problems.