Abstract
This paper investigates the inverse problems of simultaneous reconstruction of time-dependent thermal conductivity, convection or absorption coefficients in the parabolic heat equation governing transient heat and bio-heat thermal processes. Using initial and boundary conditions, as well as heat moments as over-determination conditions ensure that these inverse problems have a unique solution. However, the problems are still ill-posed since small errors in the input data cause large errors in the output solution. To overcome this instability we employ the Tikhonov regularization. A discussion of the choice of multiple regularization parameters is provided. The finite-difference method with the Crank–Nicolson scheme is employed as a direct solver. The resulting inverse problems are recast as nonlinear minimization problems and are solved using the lsqnonlin routine from the MATLAB toolbox. Numerical results are presented and discussed.