A non-iterative method for recovering the space-dependent source and the initial value simultaneously in a parabolic equation

Abstract

AbstractThis paper is concerned with the inverse problem for determining the space-dependent source and the initial value simultaneously in a parabolic equation from two over-specified measurements. By means of transforming information of the initial value into the source term and obtaining a combined source term, the parabolic equation problem is converted into a parabolic problem with homogeneous conditions. Then the considered inverse problem is formulated into a regularized minimization problem, which is implemented by the finite element method based on solving a sequence of well-posed direct problems. The uniqueness of inverse solutions are proved by the solvability of the corresponding variational problem, and the conditional stability as well as the convergence rate of regularized solutions are also provided. Then the error estimate of approximate regularization solutions is presented in the finite-dimensional space. The proposed method is a very fast non-iterative algorithm, and it can successfully solve the multi-dimensional inverse problem for recovering the space-dependent source and the initial value simultaneously. Numerical results of five examples including one- and two-dimensional cases show that the proposed method is efficient and robust with respect to data noise.