Reconstruction of Timewise Dependent Coefficient and Free Boundary in Nonlocal Diffusion Equation with Stefan and Heat Flux as Overdetermination Conditions

Abstract

The problem of reconstruction of a timewise dependent coefficient and free boundary at once in a nonlocal diffusion equation under Stefan and heat Flux as nonlocal overdetermination conditions have been considered. A Crank–Nicolson finite difference method (FDM) combined with the trapezoidal rule quadrature is used for the direct problem. While the inverse problem is reformulated as a nonlinear regularized least-square optimization problem with simple bound and solved efficiently by MATLAB subroutine lsqnonlin from the optimization toolbox. Since the problem under investigation is generally ill-posed, a small error in the input data leads to a huge error in the output, then Tikhonov’s regularization technique is applied to obtain regularized stable results.