Applied Mathematical Modelling 27 (2003) 337344

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Determination of specic heat with a simple inverse approach

P.J. Bendeich *, J.M. Barry, W. Payten
Materials Division, Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), Private Mail Bag 1, Menai, NSW 2234, Australia Received 1 December 2001; received in revised form 1 October 2002; accepted 1 November 2002

Abstract A new, simple mathematical technique permits the specic heat of a material to be determined through an inverse process without recourse to solving the time-dependent heat conduction equation. The method requires time-varying temperatures to be observed in a material sample and the total computed heat energy within the sample balanced against energy supplied from a heating source. The approach holds mathematical promise for application in the design of instruments for measuring thermal properties or possibly as a regularisation technique to be applied in conjunction with other inverse approaches to the problem. Crown Copyright 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Specic heat; Simple inverse thermal; Heat ux; Energy balance

1. Introduction One of the main hindrances to accurate nite element analysis (FEA) is the lack of accurate and detailed material data. The reason for this is usually the diculty in setting up cost-eective measuring equipment. In the case of specic heat, measurement is usually time consuming and requires expensive testing apparatus such as the laser ash method [1]. For this reason, specic heat data is usually quoted at only a few temperature points and rarely for the material grade required. The conceptual advantage of the test method presented in this paper is that the test rig is relatively simple, with the complexity being contained in the inverse method. As the specic heat of a material is temperature dependent, its recovery under experimental conditions by a method based on observed temperatures is a dicult inverse problem. Several

Corresponding author. Fax: +61-2-9543-7179. E-mail address: pbx@ansto.gov.au (P.J. Bendeich).

0307-904X/02/$ - see front matter Crown Copyright 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/S0307-904X(02)00136-1

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papers have addressed the issue of determining the specic heat and other thermal properties [2 5]. Each paper requires the solution of the time-dependent heat equation either directly or in a simplied form. The method outlined here is computationally simpler and avoids consideration of the heat conduction equation by instead considering the total energy balance of the system. It is assumed that experimental equipment is available and there is a known heat ux applied to an otherwise insulated annular disc of material. The heat ux is applied to the inside wall, while a limited number of thermocouples (in this study 13) are placed at equal intervals within the material and on the internal and external walls. If temperatures are recorded over a period of time, the energy increase within the system may be calculated, provided the specic heat of the material is known, by a simple integration. A specied function is chosen for the specic heat and the parameterisation of the function completed by balancing the computed internal energy with that supplied to the disk from a heating element. Alternatively, as is implemented here, an integral of the specic heat with respect to temperature may be approximated. The specic heat may be subsequently recovered.

2. Experimental system The conceptual system envisaged for this type of experiment is shown in Fig. 1. The test piece geometry is an annular disk with a centralised hole. Heating of the disk is from the internal wall via a heating element centrally located to radiate heat uniformly with a known heat ux. A feedback loop from the heat ux sensor to the element power supply allows the heating rate to be controlled by this parameter. The heat ux sensor is essentially a pair of thermopile junction

Fig. 1. Test rig conceptual setup.

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layers separated by a layer of thermal resistant material where the heat ux is proportional to the dierential voltage generated across the material. As the heating mode is predominantly radiative the ux sensor does not require perfect contact with the sample, however, it must be located at the same distance from the heating element as the sample and have a similar value for emissivity, e. Thermocouple instrumentation across the radius of the disk, at mid-height, provides an accurate temperature prole at multiple time intervals. The disk has to be fully insulated above and below and around its outer radius. A major advantage with this system is the ability to obtain specic heat values over a wide range of temperatures in a single test. In addition bulk, relatively coarse, inhomogeneous materials can be measured without individual aggregates unduly inuencing test results. The system described can also be used in determining thermal diusivity, a, [6] over a range of temperatures and hence thermal conductivity, k, can be extracted via the relationship k aCp q; where Cp is the specic heat and q is the material density. 1

3. Mathematical formulation The specic heat Cp T of a material is temperature dependent. Consequently, any inverse method that seeks to directly recover the specic heat from the time-dependent heat conduction equation requires repeated solution of that equation. In order to avoid solving the heat equation in any form, an alternative approach was devised based on energy loads in the system. It is assumed that the temperatures Ti;j , j 1; . . . ; nr ; i 1; . . . ; nt have been observed over nt time intervals and at nr (in this study) equally spaced radial locations in the annular disc. The observations at j 1 and j nr correspond to the inner and outer wall of the disc, respectively, that is for radii ri and ro , respectively. The total energy added to the disc since the initial time t 0 may be calculated at any later instant of time t by Z ro Z T r;t r Cp T dT dr; 2 Ecalc t 2phq
ri T r;0

provided the specic heat is known and where h is the thickness of the disk and q the material density. It is possible to represent the specic heat Cp T with various approximations, however, this is avoided. Instead the inner integral is a function of temperature alone, so the energy equation (2) may be rewritten as Z ro rX T r; t X T r; 0 dr; 3 Ecalc t 2phq
ri

where X T r; t is the indenite integral of the specic heat with respect to temperature Z X T Cp T dT :

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The indenite integral may be approximated as np X X T pi /i T ;

i1

where /i are appropriate basis functions. Various functional forms in numerical tests were trialed as approximations for the indenite integral. These included polynomials, orthogonal polynomials and cubic splines as well as linear hat functions. The preferred choice is the cubic spline represented as a normalised B-spline. It has been sucient to restrict the spline to two intervals in studies so far completed. In B-spline representation, this requires the determination of ve parameters. Consequently, Eq. (5) becomes 5 X pi Ni T ; 6 X T
i1

where Ni T denotes a normalised B-spline of degree three. The energy computed by (3) must balance with the energy added to the system from the heating element. The supplied heat, Es , is calculated by Z t rs ds 7 Es t A
0

where rs is the time-dependent heat ux and A is the area of cross-section of the inner wall of the disc. Eq. (7) is computed for each of the nt time steps for which material temperature observations are recorded. The parameters pi , i 1; . . . ; 5 are recovered by minimisation of the least squares error function nt X -i Es ti Ecalc ti 2 : 8
i1

Once X T is established, the specic heat may be recovered as a rst derivative. It is well established [7] that the dierentiation process presents particular diculties in the solution of inverse problems. The continuity of derivatives up to the second order with cubic splines makes them more attractive for this application. An alternative approach would be to approximate the specic heat in Eq. (2) directly with the selected approximation form. This was avoided because it would have raised the order of the approximating function by one degree as a result of the inner integral. For example, a cubic spline would then become a fourth order function in the minimisation problem. Inverse problems are extremely sensitive to errors in the data; the presence of a fourth order function would exaggerate the sensitivities. The lower order function, as selected, has the eect of applying a form of regularisation to the problem without the need to apply articial smoothing in the form of Tikhonov regularisation. 4. Testing An initial test was carried out using a prescribed polynomial function for the specic heat to accurately produce a set of temperature observations by solving the time-dependent heat equation

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by an FEA model. With this highly accurate data, the procedure was able to recover the prescribed function. In the next test, the time-dependent heat equation was solved with a known specic heat and properties for an actual material (silicon nitride) [8] to produce a set of temperatures. Silicon nitride was chosen as it was a material of particular interest to the authors. A standard calibration material was not needed as the success of the technique is judged by the ability to accurately recover a known specic heat input that, in theory, could be any set of values. In this test, the Bspline approximation functions are not identical to the known specic heat and can only approximate the actual specic heat. The method was able to reproduce the specic heat where the data was free from error for the range of temperatures under consideration in the case of a constant applied heat ux. The method failed to adequately reproduce the specic heat at the high end of the temperature scale for the linearly increasing heat source. This will be considered in Section 5. Finally, two sets of test data were then generated containing random errors corresponding to experimental errors for two dierent heating conditions: a constant heat ux r 36 000 (J/s)/m2 , a linear ramp heat ux r 400 143:2t. The random errors were then applied to the computed temperature data and the heat ux to simulate errors in both the measured temperatures and heat ux as T r; t T r; t1 rand:02 and rt rt1 rand:01; 10 where the random number generator rand produces a normally distributed random number with zero mean and standard deviation given by the argument. 9

Fig. 2. Actual and recovered specic heat with constant applied heat ux.

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Fig. 3. Actual and recovered specic heat with linear rising heat ux.

Results are presented for a constant heat ux in Fig. 2, while those for the linear ramp heat ux are shown in Fig. 3. The continuous line shows the actual specic heat of silicon nitride while the mean recovered specic heat is indicated by the inner broken line. The bounding envelope corresponding to the upper and lower extremes of the simulation are displayed. In both cases all data was normalised before the optimisation process. Equal weighting wI was applied in the least squares functional (2). Equally spaced spline intervals were employed. 5. Discussion For both test cases, the method appears satisfactory for temperatures up to 800 C. For a constant heat ux, there is a small discrepancy as the temperature rises further. However, for higher temperatures with the linear ramp, the results are not acceptable and a large variation results from the perturbations applied. Whilst these diculties occur for the specic heat, the model calculates the energy of the system (except at the higher temperatures where the discrepancies are more pronounced) in a much more reliable manner. This is of little surprise, as energy is the quantity that is directly tted and the specic heat is related to the tted energy through a dierentiation process. As dierentiation amplies errors, the use of a spline is the most attractive choice in handling the derivative while minimising errors. However, even this approach fails for high temperatures. The reason behind the failure of the method to handle the complete temperature range may be understood from Table 1, where the limited number of data points involving the higher temperatures are indicated. Those points where the higher temperatures occur are on the inner radius wall, but the function to be minimised is dominated by observations at lower temperatures. Even those points where higher temperatures occur are of considerably less importance to the minimisation process than other points due to their much smaller contribution to the disc mass (which is related to the square of the disc radius). In Table 1 the mass weighted frequency of temperature observations reveals that, above 800 C, there are only 20% and 0.7% of the observations relevant for the constant heat

P.J. Bendeich et al. / Appl. Math. Modelling 27 (2003) 337344 Table 1 Cumulative frequency (by percentage) of mass weighted temperature observations Temperature range (C) 0100 100200 200300 300400 400500 500600 600700 700800 800900 9001000 1000 Cumulative frequency constant heat ux 6.05 14.57 23.95 34.08 44.95 56.35 68.26 80.61 93.31 99.94 100.0

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Cumulative frequency ramp heat ux 30.92 48.11 61.70 73.70 84.70 94.92 98.24 99.23 99.68 99.96 100.0

ux and ramp, respectively. Consequently, the ability and degree of the method to handle those high regions is without surprise for the two cases. The energy in the system increases linearly with time for the constant heat ux (7) but quadratically for the linear ramp heat ux. This mitigates against the accumulation of data at higher temperatures. Arbitrary weighting was applied to the functional (3) where high temperature points were weighted to balance their low frequency and ad hoc weighting systems were discovered, allowing the true specic heat to be recovered for all regions tested. Alternatively, by deleting some of the low temperature data a good approximation to the specic heat was produced. However, there was no easy choice as to where the dividing line should be placed. Those tests suggest some alternative strategies that could be considered if the technique is to be taken a stage further. It is essential to increase the relative proportion of high temperature data used in the minimisation process. This could be done by reducing the increase in heat ux as temperature rises, while running the experiment for longer times. Alternatively, if practical, the heat input could be cycled for upper temperature levels in order to build up a larger set of high temperature data. It may be possible to extend and use the method in a dierent form for the direct inverse approach that recovers the specic heat by matching solutions of the time-dependent heat equation with observed temperatures. Here energy matching to within a prescribed limit could act as a regularising constraint on the primary method of temperature dierence minimisation. The assumption that the test sample is perfectly insulated may be the major obstacle in producing a working test rig. Preliminary FEA results indicate energy losses through typical insulation materials will eect the temperature prole within the sample. Without complex methods of compensation it may be dicult to produce satisfactory specic heat determinations.

6. Conclusions A new simple mathematical technique has been developed and demonstrated for the determination of temperature-dependant specic heat. The method relies on a total energy balance of a system and avoids the time-dependant heat conduction equation.

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The technique can also be used as a regularisation technique in conjunction with other inverse methods.

References
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