Space-time finite element methods for the initial temperature reconstruction

03/30/2021

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by   Ulrich Langer, et al.

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This work is devoted to the reconstruction of the initial temperature in the backward heat equation using the space-time finite element method on fully unstructured space-time simplicial meshes proposed by Steinbach (2015). Such a severely ill-posed problem is tackled by the standard Tikhonov regularization method. This leads to a related optimal control for an parabolic equation in the space-time domain. In this setting, the control is taken as initial condition, whereas the terminal observation data serve as target. The objective becomes a standard terminal observation functional combined with the Tikhonov regularization. The space-time finite element method is applied to the space-time optimality system that is well-posed for a fixed regularization parameter.