A noniterative reconstruction method for solving a time-fractional inverse source problem from partial boundary measurements

Abstract

In this paper, a noniterative method for solving an inverse source problem governed by the two-dimensional time-fractional diffusion equation is proposed. The basic idea consists in reconstructing the geometrical support of the unknown source from partial boundary measurements of the associated potential. A Kohn–Vogelius type shape functional is considered together with a regularization term penalizing the relative perimeter of the unknown set of anomalies. Identifiability result is derived and uniqueness of a minimizer is ensured. The shape functional measuring the misfit between the solutions of two auxiliary problems containing information about the boundary measurements is minimized with respect to a finite number of ball-shaped trial anomalies by using the topological derivative method. In particular, the second-order topological gradient is exploited to devise an efficient and fast noniterative reconstruction algorithm. Finally, some numerical experiments are presented, showing different features of the proposed approach in reconstructing multiple anomalies of varying shapes and sizes by taking noisy data into account.