An optimization technique is applied to design of heat transfer systems in which the natural convection is important. The inverse methodology is employed to estimate the unknown strengths of heaters on the heater surface of a square cavity with free convection from the knowledge of the desired temperature and heat flux distributions over a given design surface. The direct and the sensitivity problems are solved by finite volume method. The conjugate gradient method is used for minimization of an objective function, which is expressed by the sum of square residuals between estimated and desired heat fluxes over the design surface. The performance and accuracy of the present method for solving inverse convection heat transfer problems is evaluated by comparing the results with a benchmark problem and a numerical experiment. © 2008 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.

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