ESTIMATION OF THE TIME-DEPENDENT PROFILE OF A MELTING FRONT BY INVERSE RESOLUTION

The profile and time evolution of a solid/liquid interface in a phase change process is estimated by solving an inverse heat transfer proble m, using data measurements in the solid phase only. One then faces the inverse resolution of a heat equation in a variable and a priori unkn own 2D domain. This ill-posed problem is solved by a regularization ap proach: the unknown function (position of the melting front) is obtain ed by minimization of a two component criterion, consisting of a dista nce between the output of a simulation model and the measured data, to which a penalizing function. is added in order to restore the continu ity of the inverse operator. A numerical study is developed to analyze the validity domain of the identification method. From simulation tes ts, it is shown that the minimum signal/noise ratio that can be handle d depends strongly on the position of the measurement sensors.