The inverse heat conduction problem on the heat transfer characteristics of cooled/heated laminar flows through finite length thick-walled circular tubes is studied, using temperature measurements taken at several different locations within the fluid in this paper. The method of radial basis functions is coupled with the boundary control technique to estimate the unknown temperature on the external surface of the circular pipe. The main idea of the proposed method is to solve the direct problem instead of solving the inverse problem directly. The temperature data obtained from the direct problem are used to simulate the temperature measurement for the inverse problem, and during the calculation, the Tikhonov regularization and L-curve methods are employed to solve the inverse problem. Therefore, this study also considers the influence of errors in these measurements upon the precision of the estimated results as well as the influence of the locations and number of sensors used upon the accuracy of theestimated results. The results indicate that the accuracy of the estimated results is improved by taking temperature measurements in locations close to the the unknown boundary. Finally, the results confirm that the proposed method is capable of yielding accurate results even when errors in the temperature measurements are present.
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