Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer Research

Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer Research

Solving the Inverse Heat Transfer Problem in a Turbine Blade Model Using Machine Learning Algorithms

Document Type : Full Length Research Article

Authors
1 Faculty of Mechanical Engineering
2 Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Semnan University, P.O.B. 35131-191, Semnan, Iran
3 School of Engineering, Macquarie University, NSW 2109, Australia
10.22075/jhmtr.2026.40871.1934
Abstract
Measuring turbine blade temperature is critically important due to the material's thermal limits. In this study, machine learning (ML) method has been used to predict the heat flux of the outer surface of a turbine blade model. The heat flux is predicted from the outlet temperature and the inlet velocity and inlet temperature and blade model length, which is in inverse heat transfer problems (IHTP). The Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations were solved to analyze heat transfer, and the k–ω model was used to account for turbulence effects. Simulations were carried out in 648 different cases with varying inlet velocities (6 to 20 m/s), inlet temperatures (300 to 310 K), blade heat fluxes (400 to 2000 W/m²) and blade model lengths (180 to 220 mm). The channel surface temperature, measured 100 mm downstream of the blade model, was recorded as the output. The results of the numerical analysis showed that the surface temperature is directly proportional to the heat flux of the blade model and is inversely proportional to the flow rate. The simulation results were processed as an inverse problem using support vector regression (SVR), optimized support vector regression, Gussian Process Regression (GPR), and multi-layer Perceptron (MLP) algorithms. The Marine Predators Algorithm (MPA) was utilized to optimize the hyperparameters of the SVR model, resulting to a significant improvement in the results. The mean absolute error for support vector regression, optimized support vector regression, multi-layer Perceptron, and Gaussian process regression algorithms were 0.0564, 0.0094, 0.0037, and 0.0069, respectively. These results indicate that the multi-layer Perceptron algorithm provided the best prediction performance for this problem. Finally, the MLP method was also processed with 792 and 432 data sets, which shows that the results are independent of the number of data sets.
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Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript
Available Online from 09 August 2026

  • Receive Date 09 April 2026
  • Revise Date 07 July 2026
  • Accept Date 09 August 2026