The determination of an unknown source for a space fractional advection dispersion equation

Abstract

In this paper, we are interested in the estimation of the source term for a space fractional advection dispersion equation using concentration and flux measurements at final time. An example of application is the identification of contamination source in groundwater transport. We propose to use the so called modulating functions method which has been introduced for parameters estimation. This method allows to transfer the estimation problem into solving a system of algebraic equations. Numerical examples are given to illustrate the effectiveness and the robustness of the proposed method. Finally, a comparison between a Tikhonov-based optimization method and the modulating functions approach is presented.