Study on Thermal Contact Resistance Estimation in Planar Medium

Abstract

Thermal contact resistance(TCR) is one of the important parameters in heat transfer problems of engineering, and it is necessary to estimate the value of TCR effectively in many engineering fields. Considering the limitation of current estimation methods of TCR such as only focusing on one-dimensional thermal conduction, getting a single value of TCR merely, and the temperature measuring points only being placed in temperature gradient direction of mediums, boundary element method(BEM) and conjugate gradient method are combined to estimate the TCR in planar mediums. The value of TCR in relation to the position of contact interface line is estimated with this method, and the positions of temperature measuring points can be selected randomly because of the characteristic of BEM that there is no necessity to discrete the inner area and it is sufficient to discrete the boundary. The analysis of calculation examples base on heat transfer model of planar medium demonstrates that:this method can estimate the TCR effectively, but the ill-posedness is also existed in this method which is one of the inverse problems, and the calculation error of TCR is increased with the distance from temperature measuring points to contact interface, the estimation precision and stability can be improved after optimization with least square method.