Stable Numerical Identification of Sources in Non-Homogeneous Media

Abstract

In this work, we present a numerical algorithm to solve the inverse problem of volumetric sources from measurements on the boundary of a non-homogeneous conductive medium, which is made of conductive layers with constant conductivity in each layer. This inverse problem is ill-posed since there is more than one source that can generate the same measurement. Furthermore, the ill-posedness is due to the fact that small variations (or errors) in the measurement (input data) can produce substantial variations in the identified source location. We propose two steps to solve this inverse problem in some classes of sources: we first recover the harmonic part of the volumetric source, and, in a second step, we compute the non-harmonic part of the source. For the reconstruction of the harmonic part of the source, we follow a variational approach based on the reformulation of the inverse problem as a distributed control problem, for which the cost function incorporates a penalized term with the input data on the boundary. This cost function is minimized by a conjugate gradient algorithm in combination with a finite element discretization. We recover the non-harmonic component of the source using a priori information and an iterative algorithm for some particular classes of sources. To validate the numerical methodology, we develop synthetic examples both in circular (simple) and irregular (complex) regions. The numerical results show that the proposed methodology allows to recover the complete source and produce stable and accurate numerical solutions.

Keywords

• inverse problem
• harmonic sources
• control theory
• conjugate gradient method
• finite element method