Reconstruction of boundary regimes in the inverse problem of thermal convection of a high-viscosity fluid

A problem of reconstruction of boundary regimes in a model for free convection of a high-viscosity fluid is considered. A variational method and a quasi-inversion method are suggested for solving the problem in question. The variational method is based on the reduction of the original inverse problem to some equivalent variational minimum problem for an appropriate objective functional and solving this problem by a gradient method. When realizing the gradient method for finding a minimizing element of the objective functional, an iterative process actually reducing the original problem to a series of direct well-posed problems is organized. For the quasi-inversion method, the original differential model is modified by means of introducing special additional differential terms of higher order with small parameters as coefficients. The new perturbed problem is well-posed; this allows one to solve this problem by standard methods. An appropriate choice of small parameters gives an opportunity to obtain acceptable qualitative and quantitative results in solving the inverse problem. A comparison of the methods suggested for solving the inverse problem is made with the use of model examples. © 2006 Pleiades Publishing, Inc.