A Study of Thermal Contact using Nonlinear System Identification Models

One interesting application of system identification method is to identify and control the heat transfer from the exhaust valve to the seat to keep away the valve from being damaged. In this study, two co-axial cylindrical specimens are used as exhaust valve and its seat. Using the measured temperatures at different locations of the specimens and with a semi-analytical method, the temperature distribution of the specimens is calculated and consequently, the thermal contact conductance is calculated. By applying the system identification method and having the temperatures at both sides of the contact surface, the temperature transfer function is calculated. With regard to the fact that the thermal contact has nonlinear behavior, two nonlinear black-box models called nonlinear ARX and NLN Hammerstein-Wiener models are taken for accurate estimation. Results show that the NLN Hammerstein-Wiener models with wavelet network nonlinear estimator is the best.