Application of the method of fundamental solutions and radial basis functions for inverse transient heat source problem

The paper considers the determination of heat sources in unsteady 2-D heat conduction problem. The determination of the strength of a heat source is achieved by using the boundary condition, initial condition and a known value of temperature in chosen points placed inside the domain. For the solution of the inverse problem of identification of the heat source the theta-method with the method of fundamental solution and radial basis functions is proposed. Due to ill conditioning of the inverse transient heat conduction problem the Tikhonov regularization method based on SVD decomposition was used. In order to determine the optimum value of the regularization parameter the L-curve criterion was used. For testing purposes of the proposed algorithm the 2-D inverse boundary-initial-value problems in square region Omega with the known analytical solutions are considered. The numerical results show that the proposed method is easy to implement and pretty accurate. Moreover the accuracy of the results does not depend on the value of the theta parameter and is greater in the case of the identification of the temperature field than in the case of the identification of the heat sources function. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.