Physics-Informed Neural Networks for Thermophysical Property Retrieval

TL;DR

This paper introduces a physics-informed neural network (PINN) framework to accurately estimate the thermal conductivity of building walls from in situ thermographic data, addressing environmental variability and reducing measurement invasiveness.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel iterative PINN-based method for in situ thermal property estimation, combining forward modeling and parameter optimization under realistic environmental conditions.

Findings

Achieves a maximum MAE of 4.0851 in thermal conductivity estimation.

Effectively predicts thermal conductivity across different environmental conditions.

Demonstrates robustness despite deviations from steady-state assumptions.

Abstract

Inverse heat problems refer to the estimation of material thermophysical properties given observed or known heat diffusion behaviour. Inverse heat problems have wide-ranging uses, but a critical application lies in quantifying how building facade renovation reduces thermal transmittance, a key determinant of building energy efficiency. However, solving inverse heat problems with non-invasive data collected in situ is error-prone due to environmental variability or deviations from theoretically assumed conditions. Hence, current methods for measuring thermal conductivity are either invasive, require lengthy observation periods, or are sensitive to environmental and experimental conditions. Here, we present a PINN-based iterative framework to estimate the thermal conductivity k of a wall from a set of thermographs; our framework alternates between estimating the forward heat problem with a PINN for a fixed k, and optimizing k by comparing the thermographs and surface temperatures predicted by the PINN, repeating until the estimated k's convergence. Using both environmental data captured by a weather station and data generated from Finite-Volume-Method software simulations, we accurately predict k across different environmental conditions and data collection sampling times, given the temperature profile of the wall at dawn is close to steady state. Although violating the steady-state assumption impacts the accuracy of k's estimation, we show that our proposed framework still only exhibits a maximum MAE of 4.0851. Our work demonstrates the potential of PINN-based methods for reliable estimation of material properties in situ and under realistic conditions, without lengthy measurement campaigns. Given the lack of research on using machine learning, and more specifically on PINNs, for solving in-situ inverse problems, we expect our work to be a starting point for more research on the topic.