Inverse determination of multiple heat sources’ release history in indoor environments

The heat source of an air-conditioned room has an important effect on the indoor environment. The release rates of heat sources are related to the comfort of the designed thermal environment, so they must be determined. Traditional design methods rely on iterative guess-and-correct, which consumes resources and time and cannot meet the needs of modern design. This study aims to establish an inverse model of Tikhonov regularization and least square optimization by using computational fluid dynamics (CFD), so that researchers can accurately determine the time release rate of multiple heat sources with known parameters. The temporal release rates can then be solved based on the inverse matrix operation with the temperature series at different discrete times. The study speeds up the solving process and expresses the temperature as the convolution integral between the temperature response of the thermal response factor and the arbitrary release rate. The results show that applying the above method to the quantization of the temporal release rates of three heat sources in a three-dimensional cavity can correctly determine the temporal release rates of multiple heat sources. The errors between the inversely determined release rates and the actual release rates are less than 40%.