Identification of boiling heat fluxes in a single-bubble nucleate boiling experiment using a three-dimensional transient heat conduction model

Boiling heat transfer is still hard to model and to predict. Among all kinds of studies on boiling processes, the estimation of the local heat fluxes on the boiling surface is fundamental. From the mathematical point of view, it belongs to the class of inverse heat conduction problems (IHCPs) which cannot be solved straightforwardly. In this paper, we estimate the local boiling heat flux by solving a three-dimensional (3D) transient IHCP using the measured temperature field from a single-bubble nucleate boiling experiment. The considered IHCP is formulated as a mathematical optimization problem and solved by the conjugate gradient (CG) method.