Inverse problem of time-dependent heat sources numerical reconstruction Original Research Article

This work studies the inverse problem of reconstructing a time-dependent heat source in the heat conduction equation using the temperature measurement specified at an internal point. Problems of this type have important applications in several fields of applied science. By the Green’s function method, the inverse problem is reduced to an operator equation of the first kind which is known to be ill-posed. The uniqueness of the solution for the inverse problem is obtained by the contraction mapping principle. A numerical algorithm on the basis of the Landweber iteration is designed to deal with the operator equation and some typical numerical experiments are also performed in the paper. The numerical results show that the proposed method is stable and the unknown heat source is recovered very well.