Inverse Problems for the Heat Equation Using Conjugate Gradient Methods

In many engineering systems, e.g., in heat exchanges, reflux condensers, combustion chambers, nuclear vessels, etc. concerned with high temperatures/pressures/loads and/or hostile environments, certain properties of the
physical medium, geometry, boundary and initial conditions are not known and their direct measurement can be very inaccurate or even inaccessible. In such a situation, one can adopt an inverse approach and try to infer the unknowns from some extra accessible measurements of other quantities that may be available. The purpose of this thesis is to determine the unknown space-dependent coefficients and/or initial temperature in inverse problems of heat transfer, especially to simultaneously reconstruct several unknown quantities. These inverse problems are investigated from additional pieces of information, such as internal temperature observations, final measured temperature and time-integral temperature measurement. The main difficulty involved in the solution of these inverse problems is that they are typically ill-posed. Thus, their solutions are unstable under small perturbations of the input data and classical numerical techniques fail to provide accurate and stable numerical results. Throughout this thesis, the inverse problems are transformed into optimization problems, and their minimizers are shown to exist. A variational method is employed to obtain their Fréchet gradients with respect to the unknown quantities. Based on this gradient, the conjugate gradient method (CGM) is established together with the adjoint and sensitivity problems. The stability of the numerical solution is investigated by introducing Gaussian random noise into the input measured data. Accurate and stable numerical solutions are obtained when using the CGM regularized by the discrepancy principle.