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Estimating Thermal Conductivity and Volumetric Specific Heat of a Functionally Graded Material using Photothermal Radiometry

Functionally graded materials (FGMs) are inhomogeneous materials in which the material properties vary with respect to space. Research has been done by scientific community in developing techniques like photothermal radiometry (PTR) to measure the thermal conductivity and volumetric heat capacity of FGMs. One of the problems involved in the technique is to solve the inverse problem, i.e., estimating the thermal properties after the frequency scan has been obtained. The present work involves finding the unknown thermal conductivity and volumetric heat capacity of the FGMs by using finite volume method. By taking the flux entering the sample as periodic and solving the discretized 1-D thermal wave field equation at a frequency domain, one can obtain the complex temperatures at the surface of the sample for each frequency. These complex temperatures when solved for a range of frequencies gives the phase vs frequency scan which can then be compared to original frequency scan obtained from the PTR experiment by using a residual function. Brute force and gradient descent optimization methods have been implemented to estimate the unknown thermal conductivity and volumetric specific heat of the FGMs through minimization of the residual function. In general, the spatial composition profile of the FGMs can be approximated by using a smooth curve. Three functional forms namely Arctangent curve, Hermite curve, and Bezier curve are used in approximating the thermal conductivity and volumetric heat capacity distributions in the FGMs. The use of Hermite and Bezier curves gives the flexibility to control the slope of the curve i.e. the thermal property distribution along the thickness of the sample. Two-layered samples with constant thermal properties and three layered samples in which one of the layer has varying thermal properties with respect to thickness are considered. The program is written in Fortran and several test runs are performed. Results obtained are close to the original thermal property values with some deviation based on the stopping criteria used in the gradient descent algorithm. Calculating the gradients at each iteration takes considerable amount of time and if these gradient values are already available, the problem can be solved at a faster rate. One of the methods is extending automatic differentiation to complex numbers and calculating the gradient values ahead; this is left for future work.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:unt.edu/info:ark/67531/metadc1062896
Date12 1900
CreatorsKoppanooru, Sampat Kumar Reddy
ContributorsChoi, Tae-Youl, Horne, Kyle, Shi, Sheldon
PublisherUniversity of North Texas
Source SetsUniversity of North Texas
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis or Dissertation
Formatix, 58 pages, Text
RightsPublic, Koppanooru, Sampat Kumar Reddy, Copyright, Copyright is held by the author, unless otherwise noted. All rights Reserved.

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