Inverse estimation of heat flux and temperature field for a nonlinear heat transfer system using step-renewed two-stage Kalman filter

Abstract

Inverse estimation of the thermal input and states is a useful tool for the monitoring of a thermal system. Nonlinear heat transfer is a quite common issue in this kind of problem. As the thermal properties are temperature-dependent, it is difficult to inversely estimate the input and temperature field. To deal with this problem, a step-renewed scheme is adopted into the weighted optimal two-stage Kalman filter (WOTSKF), forming step-renewed WOTSKF (SR-WOTSKF). This strategy is a marching method, without solving the Jacobian matrix in extended Kalman filter. The feasibility of dealing with the nonlinear inverse heat transfer problem is implemented by comparing WOTSKF and SR-WOTSKF. Then, the weighting factor, initial guess of the input heat flux and measurement noise are changed to investigate their effects on the simultaneous estimation results of heat flux and temperature field. It is found that when the weighting factor is 0.95, the relative error of the estimated heat flux using SR-WOTSKF is approximately 2.73% which is much lower than that using WOTSKF. Results using SR-WOTSKF demonstrate that the estimation results are independent of the initial guess and the estimated heat flux can track the exact one in a short period. An incorrect initial guess causes the initial estimation error of the temperature and heat flux and it makes no sense to following period. When the standard deviations of the measurement noise are adopted as 0.01, 0.10, 0.50 and 1.00, the mean relative error of the heat flux is 2.73%, 4.79%, 7.71% and 9.43%, demonstrating the strong robustness of SR-WOTSKF to resist the measurement noise.