A spectral method for solving the sideways heat equation

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Abstract
We consider an inverse heat conduction problem, the sideways heat equation, which is the model of a problem where one wants to determine the temperature on the surface of a body, using interior measurements. Mathematically it can be formulated as a Cauchy problem for the heat equation, where the data are given along the line x = 1, and a solution is sought in the interval 0 x<1. The problem is ill-posed, in the sense that the solution does not depend continuously on the data. Continuous dependence of the data is restored by replacing the time derivative in the heat equation with a bounded spectral-based approximation. The cut-off level in the spectral approximation acts as a regularization parameter. Error estimates for the regularized solution are derived and a procedure for selecting an appropriate regularization parameter is given. The discretized problem is an initial value problem for an ordinary differential equation in the space variable, which can be solved using standard numerical methods, for example a Runge-Kutta method. As test problems we take equations with constant and variable coefficients.