Hot Air Gun Identification by Inverse Heat Transfer

The aim of this paper is to identify the unknown properties of an industrial hot air gun using inverse heat transfer approach. A combination of experiments and numerical analyses is used to define the convection coefficient and the produced temperature of this device. A numerical solver is developed by employment of a straightforward and powerful inverse heat transfer “The conjugate gradient method for parameter estimation”. The variation of temperature versus time in a fixed point of a steel-304 rod is sensed by a thermocouple and is given as an input to the numerical solver. The produced temperature of the hot air gun and the variation of convection heat transfer coefficient of this device as a function of distance between gun and rod are estimated in this research. Two non-dimensional distances between hot air gun and head of rod, H/D, are considered in this research: 2 and 6. These distances are chosen based on the hot jet potential core, the former is inside the potential core and the latter is outside it. The identifications of this gun are used in the process of determining unknown thermal properties of insulating and ablative materials, which are essential components of ablative heat shields, by inverse heat transfer methods.