Reconstruction of the parameter in parabolic partial differential equations using Haar wavelet method

Purpose In the past few years, Haar wavelet-based numerical methods have been applied successfully to solve linear and nonlinear partial differential equations. This study aims to propose a wavelet collocation method based on Haar wavelets to identify a parameter in parabolic partial differential equations (PDEs). As Haar wavelet is defined in a very simple way, implementation of the Haar wavelet method becomes easier than the other numerical methods such as finite element method and spectral method. The computational time taken by this method is very less because Haar matrices and Haar integral matrices are stored once and used for each iteration. In the case of Haar wavelet method, Dirichlet boundary conditions are incorporated automatically. Apart from this property, Haar wavelets are compactly supported orthonormal functions. These properties lead to a huge reduction in the computational cost of the method. Design/methodology/approach The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the source control parameter arises in quasilinear parabolic partial differential equation using Haar wavelet-based numerical method. Haar wavelets possess various properties, for example, compact support, orthonormality and closed form expression. The main difficulty with the Haar wavelet is its discontinuity. Therefore, this paper cannot directly use the Haar wavelet to solve partial differential equations. To handle this difficulty, this paper represents the highest-order derivative in terms of Haar wavelet series and using successive integration this study obtains the required term appearing in the problem. Taylor series expansion is used to obtain the second-order partial derivatives at collocation points. Findings An efficient and accurate numerical method based on Haar wavelet has been proposed for parameter identification in quasilinear parabolic partial differential equations. Numerical results are obtained from the proposed method and compared with the existing results obtained from various finite difference methods including Saulyev method. It is shown that the proposed method is superior than the conventional finite difference methods including Saulyev method in terms of accuracy and CPU time. Convergence analysis is presented to show the accuracy of the proposed method. An efficient algorithm is proposed to find the wavelet coefficients at target time. Originality/value The outcome of the paper would have a valuable role in the scientific community for several reasons. In the current scenario, the parabolic inverse problem has emerged as very important problem because of its application in many diverse fields such as tomography, chemical diffusion, thermoelectricity and control theory. In this paper, higher-order derivative is represented in terms of Haar wavelet series. In other words, we represent the solution in multiscale framework. This would enable us to understand the solution at various resolution levels. In the case of Haar wavelet, this paper can achieve a very good accuracy at very less resolution levels, which ultimately leads to huge reduction in the computational cost.