Global superconvergence of finite element methods for parabolic inverse problems

In this article we transform a large class of parabolic inverse problems into a nonclassical parabolic equation whose coefficients consist of trace type functionals of the solution and its derivatives subject to some initial and boundary conditions. For this nonclassical problem, we study finite element methods and present an immediate analysis for global superconvergence for these problems, on basis of which we obtain a posteriori error estimators. This research was supported in part by the Shahid Beheshti University, the National Basic Research Program of China (2007CB814906), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (10471103 and 10771158), Social Science Foundation of the Ministry of Education of China (Numerical methods for convertible bonds, 06JA630047), Tianjin Natural Science Foundation (07JCYBJC14300).