A Richardson-type iterative approach for identification of delamination boundaries

A direct problem of applied mathematical modelling is to determine the response of a system given the governing partial differential equations, the geometry of interest, the complete boundary and initial conditions, and material properties. When one or more of the conditions for the solution of the direct problem are unknown, an inverse problem can be formulated. One of the methods frequently used for the solution of inverse problems involves finding the values of the unknowns in a mathematical formulation such that the behavior calculated with the model matches the measured response to a degree evaluated in terms of the classical L 2 norm. Considered in this sense, the inverse problem is equivalent to an ill-posed optimization problem for the estimation of parameters whose solution in the majority of cases is a real mathematical challenge. In this contribution, we report a novel approach that avoids the mathematical difficulties inspired by the ill-posed character of the model. Our method is devoted to the computation of inverse problems furnished by second-order elliptical systems of partial differential equations and falls in the same conceptual line with the method initiated by Kozlov et al. and further extended and algorithmized by Weikl et al.