On the solution of inverse heat transfer problem using the Karhunen–Loève Galerkin method

Abstract An efficient method based on the Karhunen–Loeve Galerkin procedure is proposed for the solution of inverse problem of estimating the time-varying strength of a heat source in a two-dimensional heat conduction system. The Karhunen–Loeve Galerkin procedure converts a given system into a model with the minimum degree of freedom, and consequently the number of equations to be solved in the inverse analysis is minimized, resulting in the drastic reduction of computation time. The performance of the present technique of inverse analysis using the Karhunen–Loeve Galerkin procedure is evaluated by several numerical experiments, and is found to be very accurate as well as efficient.