A novel approach to identify the thermal conductivities of a thin anisotropic medium by the boundary element method

A common difficulty arises in characterizing the anisotropic properties of a thin sheet of anisotropic material, especially in the transverse direction. This difficulty is even more phenomenal for measuring its mechanical properties on account of its thickness. As the prelude of such investigation, this paper proposes a novel approach to identify the thermal conductivities of an unknown thin layer of anisotropic material. For this purpose, the unknown layer is sandwiched in isotropic materials with known conductivities. Prescribing proper boundary conditions, one may easily measure temperature data on a few sample boundary points. Therefore, the anisotropic thermal conductivities can be calculated inversely. For the inverse analysis, the boundary element method (BEM) is employed to combine with the conjugate gradient method (CGM). For verifying our analysis, numerical experiments were carried out. The obtained results have shown great computational efficiency and accuracy in identifying the thermal conductivities of the thin anisotropic layer.