Numerical methods for multiscale inverse problems (Q2627192)

The inverse problem (IP) of determining the highly oscillatory coefficient \(a^\varepsilon\) in partial differential equations of the form \[ \nabla\cdot\left(a^\varepsilon\nabla u^\varepsilon \right) + b u^\varepsilon = f \] from given measurements of the solutions is considered. Here, \(\varepsilon\) indicates the smallest characteristic wavelength in the problem (\(0<\varepsilon \ll 1\)). The paper is organized as follows. Section 1 is an introduction. In Section 2 a brief background on periodic homogenization is given and key microstructure models are introduced. In Section 3 a multiscale inverse problem related to the IP is formulated in the classical setting of inverse problems for elliptic equations. Uniqueness and boundary stability results are given. In Section 4 the implementation of the finite element heterogeneous multiscale method is described. Numerical results for parameter inversion are provided in Section 5. Some conclusions are given in Section 6.