A novel method for estimation of intensity and location of multiple point heat sources based on strain measurement

Abstract

A novel approach for estimation of the location and intensity of multiple point heat sources in 2D domains is proposed in this work. The proposed inverse method is based on the simultaneous application of an improved meshless method and artificial intelligence algorithms. The inverse problem is formulated as an optimization problem and is solved by an improved artificial bee colony algorithm. In this work, strain measurements, rather than the usual temperature measurements, are used in the estimation procedure. It is shown that by using the strains for estimation of heat sources, results with better accuracy and more reliability can be obtained. The estimation procedure includes several direct thermo-elasticity problems which are solved by the meshless radial point interpolation method (RPIM) with a modified integration technique. Some numerical results are presented to demonstrate the applicability and efficiency of the proposed method. The results of the proposed approach are compared with those obtained from temperature measurements, and it is shown that especially for materials with high thermal conductivity, the proposed approach is very promising.