Estimation of convection heat transfer coefficient and surface emissivity of a nonreacting specimen in cone calorimeter using RPSO method

Abstract

Data for the convection heat transfer coefficient and the surface emissivity of a matter are not easily available from the literature and are usually assumed to be constant values in most studies of pyrolysis. In this study the convection heat transfer coefficient and the surface emissivity of a specimen placed within a cone calorimeter under different external heat fluxes are estimated by using the statistical repulsive particle swarm optimization (RPSO) method. The transient surface temperature distribution of the specimen are measured from the cone calorimeter experiments for different external heat fluxes and these data are then used to determine the convection heat transfer coefficient and the surface emissivity of the specimen inversely. To check the accuracy of this method, we compared the measured temperature and the recalculated temperature of the specimen by using the estimated convection heat transfer coefficient and surface emissivity and we confirmed that they were fairly well matched with each other. We conclude that the proposed RPSO method of estimating the convection heat transfer coefficient and surface emissivity can be an alternative way of obtaining these data for various fire analyses.