A sequential algorithm and error sensitivity analysis for the inverse heat conduction problems with multiple heat sources

This paper proposes a sequential approach to determine the unknown parameters for inverse heat conduction problems which have multiple time-dependent heat sources. There are two main aims in this study, one is to derive an inverse algorithm that can estimate the unknown conditions effectively, and the other is to bring up a theoretical sensitivity analysis to discuss what causes the growth of errors. This paper has three major achievements with regard to the literature on IHCPs, as follows: (1) proposing an efficient sequential inverse algorithm that can simultaneously determine several unknown time-dependent parameters; (2) exploring why the sequential function specification method can provide a stable but inaccurate estimation when tackling problems with larger measurement errors: and (3) discussing the sensitivity problem and analyzing what factors cause the growth in error sensitivity. Three examples are applied to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method, and the numerical results show that the accurate estimations can be obtained by alleviating the error sensitivity when the measurement error is considered. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier Inc.