An adjoint approach to parameter recovery in a quasilinear parabolic PDE

Roger Thelwell
University of Washington, Dept. of Applied Mathematics

Date: February 8, 2005

We consider the recovery of the unknown functional D(u(x,t)) in the PDE given by $u_t - (D(u) u_x)_x = 0$. Adjoint methods appear to allow the effective recovery of coefficient information from a simple physical experiment, while providing direct information about the inversion map. The method will be discussed in theory and numerical results presented.