Reconstruction of an orthotropic thermal conductivity from nonlocal heat flux measurements

Raw materials are anisotropic and heterogeneous in nature, and recovering their conductivity is of utmost importance to the oil, aerospace and medical industries concerned with the identification of soils, reinforced fibre composites and organs. Due to the ill-posedness of the anisotropic inverse conductivity problem certain simplifications are required to make the model tracktable. Herein, we consider such a model reduction in which the conductivity tensor is orthotropic with the main diagonal components independent of one space variable. Then, the conductivity components can be taken outside the divergence operator and the inverse problem requires reconstructing one or two components of the orthotropic conductivity tensor of a two-dimensional rectangular conductor using initial and Dirichlet boundary conditions, as well as non-local heat flux over-specifications on two adjacent sides of the boundary. We prove the unique solvability of this inverse coefficient problem. Afterwards, numerical results indicate that accurate and stable solutions are obtained.