A stability analysis on Beck's procedure for inverse heat conduction problems (Q1908755)

The sequential function specification method first proposed by Beck is considered as one of the efficient methods for the inverse heat conduction problem (IHCP) which is extremely ill-posed and time-dependent. This method determines an ``inverse solution'' advancing in a sequential fashion in time. The values estimated at any given time depend on the solution obtained previously. The main question connected with this method is the stability; i.e., the cumulative error in the solution must remain bounded at all time. Since the first paper of Beck in 1970, few theoretical stability analyses have been studied in the literature. In this paper the author gives the conditions under which this method is stable irrespective of the data measurements. For a 1D linear IHCP, the author constructs a sequence \[ X_1=1, \quad X_j= \sum^{j-1}_{l=1} \alpha_{j-l+1} X_l, \qquad j\geq 2, \tag{1} \] such that the coefficients \(\alpha_i\) are independent of the data measured and the convergence of the series \(\sum^\infty_{j=1} |X_j |\) guarantees the stability of the method. The author presents an adequate condition on \(\alpha_j\) such that the sequence (1) is convergent, implying that the method is stable. The values of \(\alpha_j\) depend on the discretization size \(h\) of the function to be determined \(q(t)\) and the sliding time horizon (or future time interval) \(\tau\) of the method. The range of values of \(h\) and \(\tau\) which give the values of \(\alpha_j\) such that the sequence (1) is convergent, is established numerically. Under the stability condition, an error estimation of the Beck's method is obtained. Moreover, some stability conditions on the coefficients \(\alpha_j\) are discussed in the appendix.