Estimation of Heat Transfer Coefficient of Cryogen Spray Cooling with Alifanov's Iterative Regularization Method

Abstract

Cryogen spray cooling has been applied as an effective method to reduce skin damage during laser therapy for some vascular lesions. Applied over tens of milliseconds, the human skin can be instantaneously cooled for the subsequent application of laser therapy so that the skin will not be damaged by the laser heating. In this work, an inverse heat conduction problem is solved for the estimation of surface heat transfer coefficient of cryogen spray cooling based on internal temperature measurements. Alifanov's iterative regularization method is applied for the function estimation without any a priori information about the functional form of the heat transfer coefficient. The effects of experimental errors of temperature measurements and the number and position of the temperature sensors are investigated.

The authors thank the University of Hong Kong for an Internal Award for CAS membership. The first author also acknowledges CNPq and FAPERJ of Brazil for supporting his work in Brazil.