Spatiotemporal Thermal Field Modeling Using Partial Differential Equations With Time-Varying Parameters

Accurate modeling of a thermal field is one of the fundamental requirements in engineering thermal management in numerous industries. Existing studies have shown that using differential equations to model a thermal field delivers good performance when the parameters are predetermined through physical or experimental analysis. However, due to variations of the inner medium affected by certain latent factors, the parameters in differential equation models may not be treated as constants while the thermal field is estimated, and this fact poses a new challenge to field estimation by directly solving the differential equation models. In this study, a novel approach to thermal field modeling is developed by considering the parameters as functional variables that vary temporally in partial differential equations (PDEs). This approach provides a new perspective to model the dynamic thermal field by fully using the collected sensor data from the thermal system. Specifically, time-varying parameters can be constructed through a combination of basis functions whose coefficients can be efficiently estimated through the sensor data. A two-level iterative parameter estimation algorithm is also tailored to obtain the parameters in the PDE model. Both simulation and real case studies show that our proposed approach provides satisfactory estimation performance compared with the benchmark method that uses the constant parameter estimation. Note to Practitioners-The proposed method aims to model a thermal field using PDEs with time-varying parameters. To better implement this method in practice, three things are noteworthy: first, the proposed method models a thermal field by fully considering physics-specific engineering knowledge using PDEs and the collected sensor data from thermal systems. Second, because time-varying parameters in PDEs cannot be estimated directly, the proposed model represents the time-varying parameters by a combination of B-spline basis functions in terms of time. Estimating time-varying parameters is converted into estimating the constant coefficients of the basis functions. Because the derivatives of a thermal field might not have an analytical expression, the proposed model represents the thermal field by a combination of B-spline basis functions. Taking the derivatives of the thermal field is converted into taking the derivatives of the corresponding basis functions. Third, the proposed method can not only model a thermal field but can also be applied in other physics-specific engineering cases.