Applying Neural Networks to the Solution of the Inverse Heat Conduction Problem in a Gun Barrel

The primary cause of gun barrel erosion is the heat generated by the shell as its travels along the barrel. Therefore, calculating the heat flux input to the gun bore is very important when investigating wear problems in the gun barrel and examining its thermomechanical properties. This paper employs the continuous-time analog Hopfield neural network (CHNN) to compute the temperature distribution in various forward heat conduction problems. An efficient technique is then proposed for the solution of inverse heat conduction problems using a three-layered backpropagation neural network (BPN). The weak generalization capacity of BPN networks when applied to the solution of nonlinear function approximations is improved by employing the Bayesian regularization algorithm. The CHNN scheme is used to calculate the temperature in a $155mm$ gun barrel and the trained BPN is then used to estimate the heat flux of the inner surface of the barrel. The results show that the proposed neural network analysis method successfully solves forward heat conduction problems and is capable of predicting the unknown parameters in inverse problems with an acceptable error.