Determination of Surface Heat Flux in Quenching

Quench probes have been used to collect temperature data in controlled quenching experiments; the data is then used to deduce the heat transfer coefficients in the quenching medium. The process of determination of the heat transfer coefficient at the surface is the inverse heat conduction problem, which is extremely sensitive to measurement errors. This paper reports on an experimental and theoretical study of quenching carried out to determine the surface heat flux history during a quenching process by an inverse algorithm based on an analytical solution. The algorithm is applied to experimental data from a quenching experiment. The surface heat flux is then calculated, and the theoretical curve obtained from the analytical solution is compared with experimental results. The inverse calculation appears to produce fast, stable, but approximate results. These results can be used as the initial guess to improve the efficiency of iterative numerical solutions which are sensitive to the initial guess.