Inversion of Thermal Conductivity in Two-Dimensional Unsteady-State Heat Transfer System Based on Finite Difference Method and Artificial Bee Colony
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors propose to use an improved artificial bee colony algorithm (ABCA) to tackle the inverse heat conduction problems that mean to find out the thermal conductivity. The reviewer feels the current paper does not deserve to be published in the journal and can only be considered after the authors address the following comments.
The English writing needs to be substantially improved. The reviewer can easily find many grammar issues when reading the paper. The acronyms need to be defined before being used. Please clarify the differences between the gradient-based methods and the non-gradient-based methods in the Introduction, esp. on the computational costs. Please provide more references on the similar works, i.e., those using the ABCA for the same inverse problem. There are two objective functions, Eqs. (5) and (6). The authors need to clarify which one is being used. In the improved ABCA, the authors merely repeat most of the steps in the conventional ABCA, and it seems that only the step 9 is the different one. Such a repetition is not necessary. Most importantly, the authors need to provide more information of using the new step 9, and the reasons behind such a choice. Figure numbers, from 3 to 7, in the main text seem wrong. Please double check them with the figures. It is good to have different numerical tests on the impacts from the choices of the different ABCA parameters. However, the authors need to pay very much attention on the noise level. The reviewer finds that, in many tests, there is no noise in the measured data. Without noise in the data, the comparisons become much less meaningful, since readers are only interested in the robustness of the inversion method when the noise are present.Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
Review of the paper "Inversion of thermal Conductivity in Two-dimensionnal Unsteady Heat Transfer System based on Artificial Bee Colony".
This paper essentially deals with the improvement of the Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm (ABCA), in order to find the thermal conductivity of a material, based on transient measurements/computing of different point temperatures inside the domain of interest, but with a better efficiency.
Although the topic addressed by the authors is of interest, the writing is not mature enough to be published as it stands in a journal such as Applied Science. If the editor does not reject this paper, we recommend that it be thoroughly reworked to make it more understandable on the one hand, and also to allow an effective implementation of the concepts to the thermal science community. Thus we recommend to consider the following remarks before any attempt of publication in AS.
Through the introduction, different Inverse Analysis methods are presented. The authors could also mention very efficient recent methods based on Padé digital filters for example (see for example http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apm.2016.07.012 ;)
P3, L111:"T2(i, tau) is the calculated temperature".? Check formula (5).
Please transform/document all the informations given for the bee problem into informations corresponding to the thermal problem considered in this paper. For example: P4 what is the objective function f in the thermal case? P5: step 1 to 9; P5 and P6: step 1 to 10 ...
Please better explain that the finite difference method is applied here to the solution of the forward (direct) conduction problem to provide the values of the temperature at the measurement points, used by the IABCA.
Pease document how this method could be implemented from an experimental point of view, and what would be your recommendations, based on this study.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors have addressed the comments raised by the reviewer, and thus the paper is recommended as a publication in the journal.
Author Response
Dear Editors and Reviewers:
Thank you for your letter and for the reviewers’ comments concerning our manuscript entitled “Inversion of Thermal Conductivity in Two-dimensional Unsteady-state Heat Transfer System Based on Finite Difference Method and Artificial Bee Colony” (ID: applsci-627103). Those comments are all valuable and very helpful for revising and improving our paper, as well as the important guiding significance to our researches.
Thank you very much.
Best Regards
Reviewer 2 Report
Most of the remarks and suggestions have been considered with great details. The quality of the article has been greatly enhanced, so it desserves now to be published in Applied Sciences.
Please check the accuracy of reference 50 that you have added to the text.
Author Response
Dear Editors and Reviewers:
Thank you for your letter and for the reviewers’ comments concerning our manuscript entitled “Inversion of Thermal Conductivity in Two-dimensional Unsteady-state Heat Transfer System Based on Finite Difference Method and Artificial Bee Colony” (ID: applsci-627103). Those comments are all valuable and very helpful for revising and improving our paper, as well as the important guiding significance to our researches. We have studied comments carefully and have made correction which we hope meet with approval. Revised portion are marked in red in the paper. The main corrections in the paper and the responds to the reviewer’s comments are as flowing:
Point 1: Please check the accuracy of reference 50 that you have added to the text.
Response 1：We have double check and update, thank you very much.
[50] Mohamed Lotfi, Lassaad Mezrigui, Rodolphe Heyd. Study of heat conduction through a self-heated composite cylinder by Laplace transfer functions. Applied Mathematical Modelling, Volume 40, Issues 23-24, December 2016, 10360-10376
