Stable reconstruction of discontinuous solutions to the Cauchy problem in steady-state anisotropic heat conduction with non-smooth coefficients

Abstract

We study the recovery of the missing discontinuous/non-smooth thermal boundary conditions on an inaccessible portion of the boundary of the domain occupied by a solid from Cauchy data prescribed on the remaining boundary assumed to be accessible, in case of stationary anisotropic heat conduction with non-smooth/discontinuous conductivity coefficients. This inverse boundary value problem is ill-posed and, therefore, should be regularized. Consequently, a stabilising method is developed based on a priori knowledge on the solution to this inverse problem and the smoothing feature of the direct problems involved. The original problem is transformed into a control one which reduces to solving an appropriate minimisation problem in a suitable function space. The latter problem is tackled by employing an appropriate variational method which yields a gradient-type iterative algorithm that consists of two direct problems and their corresponding adjoint ones. This approach yields an algorithm designed to approximate specifically merely L2–boundary data in the context of a non-smooth/discontinuous anisotropic conductivity tensor, hence both the notion of solution to the direct problems involved and the convergence analysis of the approximate solutions generated by the algorithm proposed require special attention. The numerical implementation is realised for two-dimensional homogeneous anisotropic solids using the finite element method, whilst regularization is achieved by terminating the iteration according to two stopping criteria.