Determination of the time-dependent convection coefficient in two-dimensional free boundary problems

Purpose The purpose of the study is to solve numerically the inverse problem of determining the time-dependent convection coefficient and the free boundary, along with the temperature in the two-dimensional convection-diffusion equation with initial and boundary conditions supplemented by non-local integral observations. From the literature, there is already known that this inverse problem has a unique solution. However, the problem is still ill-posed by being unstable to noise in the input data. Design/methodology For the numerical discretization, this paper applies the alternating direction explicit finite-difference method along with the Tikhonov regularization to find a stable and accurate numerical solution. The resulting nonlinear minimization problem is solved computationally using the MATLAB routine lsqnonlin. Both exact and numerically simulated noisy input data are inverted. Findings The numerical results demonstrate that accurate and stable solutions are obtained. Originality/value The inverse problem presented in this paper was already showed to be locally uniquely solvable, but no numerical solution has been realized so far; hence, the main originality of this work is to attempt this task.