Determination of Surface Heating Distribution to Establish Targeted Thermal Environments in Industry Hydrothermal Autoclaves

Abstract

This article presents a method for the determination of the heat flux distributions to establish the desired growth environments in autoclave reactors. The algorithm consists of three submodels including the inverse natural convection of the fluid, the inverse heat conduction in the metal wall, and the heat conduction in the insulation layer. The technique is employed to obtain the heat flux distributions that establish the same growth environment as the one predicted by the two-dimensional isothermal wall model. Based on the results, practical heater designs are proposed to improve the growth environments in such industry growth vessels.

This research is partially funded by the National Science Foundation CRCD Project, Grant 9980325. The authors also give thanks to Sawyer Research Products, Inc., and the College of Engineering of the University of Akron for their support.