Recovering of the heat transfer coefficient from the temperature measurements

An inverse analysis is used to recover the heat transfer coefficient in heat conduction problems from boundary measurement of the temperature. The numerical scheme is based on the finite element method in the space variables, the method of finite differences in time, and a special iteration scheme to determine the heat transfer coefficients on each time step. The heat transfer coefficients is sought in the form of a finite segment of a series with unknown Fourier coefficients depending on time. The algorithm for solving the problem relies on theoretical results stating that this problem is well-posed and can be reduced to an operator equation with a contraction. The results of numerical experiments confirm theoretical arguments that this problem is indeed well-posed. The obtained results reveal the accuracy, efficiency, and robustness of the proposed algorithm. It is stable under random perturbations of the data.