Temperature and heat flux estimation from sampled transient sensor measurements

Laplace transform is used to solve the problem of heat conduction over a finite slab. The temperature and heat flux on the two surfaces of a slab are related by the transfer functions. These relationships can be used to calculate the front surface heat input (temperature and heat flux) from the back surface measurements (temperature and/or heat flux) when the front surface measurements are not feasible to obtain. This paper demonstrates that the front surface inputs can be obtained from the sensor data without resorting to inverse Laplace transform. Through Hadamard Factorization Theorem, the transfer functions are represented as infinite products of simple polynomials. Consequently, the relationships between the front and back surfaces are translated to the time-domain without inverse Laplace transforms. These time-domain relationships are used to obtain approximate solutions through iterative procedures. We select a numerical method that can smooth the data to filter out noise and at the same time obtain the time derivatives of the data. The smoothed data and time derivatives are then used to calculate the front surface inputs.