A synergistic combination of Asymptotic Computational Fluid Dynamics and ANN for the estimation of unknown heat flux from fin heat transfer

Abstract

This paper deals with conjugate heat transfer from a rectangular fin. The problem consists of mild steel (250 × 150 × 6 mm) fin placed vertically on aluminium base (250 × 150 × 4 mm). The aluminium plate is subjected to an unknown heat flux at the base. The fin set-up is modelled using ANSYS fluent 14.5. The fin geometry is surrounded by extended domain filled with air so as to account for natural convection conjugate heat transfer. Grid independence study is carried out to fix the number of grids. A simple correlation using Asymptotic Computational Fluid Dynamics (ACFD) is developed and the same is used as a forward model to obtain the temperature distribution considering heat flux as the input. The problem is treated as an inverse problem in which a non-iterative method, ANN is used as the inverse model to estimate the unknown heat flux from the information of temperature. The results of the forward model and the ANN predicted values are in close agreement with error less than 1%. Effect of noise on the unknown parameter is also studied extensively. © 2017 Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University