determination of a nonlinear source term in a diffusion equation with final observations扩散方程中的非线性源项的确定与最后的观察结果.pdfVIP

IJMMS 2004:14, 741–753 PII. S0161171204211383 © Hindawi Publishing Corp. DETERMINATION OF A NONLINEAR SOURCE TERM IN A DIFFUSION EQUATION WITH FINAL OBSERVATIONS GONGSHENG LI, YICHEN MA, and KAITAI LI Received 25 November 2002 This paper deals with an inverse problem of determining a nonlinear source term in a quasi- linear diffusion equation with overposed final observations. Applying integral identity meth- ods, data compatibilities are deduced by which the inverse source problem here is proved to be reasonable and solvable. Furthermore, with the aid of an integral identity that connects the unknown source terms with the known data, a conditional stability is established. 2000 Mathematics Subject Classification: 35K30. 1. Introduction. In this paper, we are concerned with an inverse source problem in a diffusion equation ut −∆u = f (u), (1.1) where the unknown source term f , being a function of the state variable only, is to be determined. Although there are many researches on such inverse source problems from the 1970s (cf., e.g., [ 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18]), it is still worthwhile to consider this kind of problem at least in the following two aspects. On one hand, the inverse source problem here is based on data measured at the final moment in an experiment that is driven by suitably controlling the boundary value. This leads to a different problem from the studies as in [ 1, 4, 10, 15, 16, 17, 18] where the source term is often assumed to have an a priori functional form, and the experiment is also different from the problem in [3, 7, 8, 12, 13, 14] where a state-dependent source term is to be found from data measured on the spatial boundar