A two-dimensional inverse heat conduction problem for estimating heat source (Q2575968)

The authors consider the problem of estimating unknown time-varying strength of the temporal-dependent heat source from measurements of the temperature inside the square domain \(D=\{(x,y):a<x<L\), \(0<y<L]\subset\mathbb R^2\}\) when the prior knowledge of the source functions is not available. This problem is an inverse heat conduction problem. It is well known that the direct problem can be solved by using the heat fundamental solution. In order to solve an inverse heat problem they convert it into an equivalent problem for the first kind Volterra integral equation. Because problem described by a Volterra integral equation is an ill-posed problem they use the Tikhonov regularization method in order obtain a useful approximation to the desired solution. For estimating the solution of a Volterra integral equation they use the sequential algorthm with triangular shape functions. In some numerical experiment they find an approximate solution.