Determination of space–time-dependent heat source in a parabolic inverse problem via the Ritz–Galerkin technique

Abstract

Three inverse problems of reconstructing the time-dependent, spacewise- dependent and both initial condition and spacewise-dependent heat source in the one-dimensional heat equation are considered. These problems are reformulated by eliminating the unknown functions using some special assumptions concerning the points in space or time as additional measurements. Then direct techniques are proposed to solve the non-classical boundary value problems. For obtaining the robust and stable approximations, Bernstein multi-scaling and B-spline basis functions in the context of the Ritz–Galerkin method are utilized to immediate passage from differential equations to algebraic equations and afterwards, a Newton-type method is used to produce the admissible solution. The numerical convergence and stability are discussed in the test examples to show that the presented schemes provide accurate and acceptable approximations.