A method of fundamental solutions for inverse heat conduction problems in an anisotropic medium

Recently, Hon and Wei proposed a method of fundamental solutions for solving isotropic inverse heat conduction problems (IHCP). It provides an efficient global approximation scheme in both spatial and time domains. In this paper, we try to extend the inherently meshless and integration-free method to solve 2D IHCP in an anisotropic medium. First, we acquire the fundamental solution of the governing equation through variables transformation. Then the truncated singular value decomposition and the L-curve criterion are applied to solve the resulting matrix equation which is highly ill-conditioned. Results for several numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the efficiency of the method proposed. The relationship between the accuracy of the numerical solutions and the value of the parameter T is also investigated. (C) 2006 Published by Elsevier Ltd.