A note on finite difference method to analysis an ill-posed problem

Abstract In [A. Shidfar, R. Pourgholi, Application of finite difference method to analysis an ill-posed problem, Appl. Math. Comput. 168 (2005) 1400–1408], the finite difference method has been for solving the inverse heat conduction problem. In this paper, we prove the error has exponential growth when x vanishing, and give the examples to show the error is too large near x  = 0, t  = 0. So, it is concluded that the method is not suitable for solving this problem.