A coupled complex boundary expanding compacts method for inverse source problems

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, we consider an inverse source problem for elliptic partial differential equations with both Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions. The unknown source term is to be determined by additional boundary data. This problem is ill-posed since the dimensionality of the boundary is lower than the dimensionality of the inner domain. To overcome the ill-posed nature, using the a priori information (sourcewise representation), and based on the coupled complex boundary method, we propose a coupled complex boundary expanding compacts method (CCBECM). A finite element method is used for the discretization of CCBECM. The regularization properties of CCBECM for both the continuous and discrete versions are proved. Moreover, an a posteriori error estimate of the obtained finite element approximate solution is given and calculated by a projected gradient algorithm. Finally, numerical results show that the proposed method is stable and effective.