Identification of Thermal Characteristics for Sensible Heat Storage from Hot Wire Measurements: Mathematical and Computational Support

The design of sensible heat storage contains an optimization process of a careful choice or an original design of materials and composites for their particular parts, components, and layers. Especially high thermal capacity and appropriate thermal conductivity, together with fire resistance, are required. In such a process, a reliable procedure of evaluation of material parameters from experimental data is needed. This article demonstrates the development of such a procedure for the case of hot-wire probes on cylindrical measurement configurations. The classical nonlinear least-squares approach, based on the semi-analytic formulas for the evolution of temperature in time, is compared with a hybrid genetic algorithm, as a representative of soft-computing approaches.