Ill-posed problems in rheology

Experimental data are always noisy and often incomplete. This leads to ambiguities if one wants to infer from the data some functions, which are related to the measured quantity through an integral equation of the first kind. In rheology many of such so-called ill-posed problems appear. Two techniques to treat such problems, the regularization method and the maximum entropy method, are applied to the determination of the relaxation spectrum from data of small oscillatory shear flow. With simulated data from a reference spectrum it is discussed how the inferred spectrum depends on the region, in which data are available. It turns out that information about the asymptotic behavior of the measured quantity can be of great help in determining the full spectrum also from incomplete data.Dedicated to Prof. Dr. J. Meissner on the occasion of his 60th birthday.