A variational method for identifying a spacewise-dependent heat source

The inverse problem of determining a spacewise-dependent heatsource for the parabolic heat equation using the usual conditionsof the direct problem and information from one supplementarytemperature measurement at a given instant of time is studied.This spacewise-dependent temperature measurement ensures thatthis inverse problem has a unique solution, but the solutionis unstable and hence the problem is ill-posed. We propose avariational conjugate gradient-type iterative algorithm forthe stable reconstruction of the heat source based on a sequenceof well-posed direct problems for the parabolic heat equationwhich are solved at each iteration step using the boundary elementmethod. The instability is overcome by stopping the iterativeprocedure at the first iteration for which the discrepancy principleis satisfied. Numerical results are presented which have theinput measured data perturbed by increasing amounts of randomnoise. The numerical results show that the proposed procedureyields stable and accurate numerical approximations after onlya few iterations.