Thermophysical property estimation by transient experiments: The effect of a biased initial temperature distribution

The identification of thermophysical properties of materials in dynamic experiments can be conveniently performed by the inverse solution of the associated heat conduction problem (IHCP). The inverse technique demands the knowledge of the initial temperature distribution within the material. As only a limited number of temperature sensors (or no sensor at all) are arranged inside the test specimen, the knowledge of the initial temperature distribution is affected by some uncertainty. This uncertainty, together with other possible sources of bias in the experimental procedure, will propagate in the estimation process and the accuracy of the reconstructed thermophysical property values could deteriorate. In this work the effect on the estimated thermophysical properties due to errors in the initial temperature distribution is investigated along with a practical method to quantify this effect. Furthermore, a technique for compensating this kind of bias is proposed. The method consists in including the initial temperature distribution among the unknown functions to be estimated. In this way the effect of the initial bias is removed and the accuracy of the identified thermophysical property values is highly improved.