Determination of Thermal Conductivities in Multilayer Materials

Abstract

The objective of this work is the determination of the materials that make up a three-layer body, based on the simultaneous estimation of the thermal conductivity of the material of each layer. The body is exposed to a one-dimensional stationary, non-invasive, heat transfer process. It is assumed that the union of each pair of consecutive materials does not present thermal resistance. The parameters to be determined are estimated using three temperature measurements, one at each interface and another at the right edge of the body. The estimation is calculated analytically and a bound is given for the estimation error. In addition, an elasticity analysis is carried out to analyze the local dependence of each estimated parameter with respect to the data. A numerical example is included to illustrate and discuss the method proposed here.