Solving stationary inverse heat conduction in a thin plate

Abstract We consider a steady state heat conduction problem in a thin plate. In the application, it is used to connect two cylindrical containers and fix their relative positions. At the same time it serves to measure the temperature on the inner cylinder. We derive a two dimensional mathematical model, and use it to approximate the heat conduction in the thin plate. Since the plate has sharp edges on the sides the resulting problem is described by a degenerate elliptic equation. To find the temperature in the interior part from the exterior measurements, we formulate the problem as a Cauchy problem for stationary heat equation. We also reformulate the Cauchy problem as an operator equation, with a compact operator, and apply the Landweber iteration method to solve the equation. The case of the degenerate elliptic equation has not been previously studied in this context. For numerical computation, we consider the case where noisy data is present and analyse the convergence.