Identifying a diffusion coefficient in a time-fractional diffusion equation

Abstract In this paper, we propose a conjugate gradient algorithm for identifying a space-dependent diffusion coefficient in a time-fractional diffusion equation from the boundary Cauchy data in one-dimensional case. The existence and uniqueness of the solution for a weak form of the direct problem are obtained. The identification of diffusion coefficient is formulated into a variational problem by the Tikhonov-type regularization. The existence, stability and convergence of a minimizer for the variational problem approach to the exact diffusion coefficient are provided. We use a conjugate gradient method to solve the variational problem based on the deductions of a sensitive problem and an adjoint problem. We test three numerical examples and show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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