Full discretization of a nonlinear parabolic problem containing volterra operators and an unknown dirichlet boundary condition

The reconstruction of an unknown solely time‐dependent Dirichlet boundary condition in a nonlinear parabolic problem containing a linear and a nonlinear Volterra operator is considered. The inverse problem is converted into a variational problem in which the unknown Dirichlet condition is eliminated using a given integral overdetermination. A time‐discrete recurrent approximation scheme is designed, using Backward Euler's method. The convergence of the approximations towards a solution of the variational problem is proved under appropriate assumptions on the data and on the Volterra operators. The uniqueness of this solution is shown in the case that the nonlinear Volterra operator satisfies a particular inequality. Moreover, the Finite Element Method is used to discretize the time‐discrete approximation scheme in space. Finally, full‐discrete error estimates are derived for a particular choice of the finite elements. The corresponding convergence rates are supported by a numerical experiment. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq 31: 1444–1460, 2015