Design of an experiment for the determination of an unknown coefficient in a nonlinear conduction-diffusion equation (Q1103123)

An inverse problem for a nonlinear diffusion equation is considered, in which the unknown diffusion coefficient is to be determined from overspecified data measured at the boundary. An experiment is described whose goal is to reproduce the unknown coefficient from the data without assuming any a priori functional form for the unknown coefficient. Numerical results are presented which indicate that the method is very sensitive to data error.