The identification of a Robin coefficient by a conjugate gradient method

This paper investigates a non‐linear inverse problem associated with the heat conduction problem of identifying a Robin coefficient from boundary temperature measurement. The variational formulation of the problem is given. The conjugate gradient method combining with the discrepancy principle for choosing the suitable stop step are proposed for solving the optimization problem, in which the finite difference method is used to solve the direct problems. The performance of the method is verified by simulating four examples. The convergence with respect to the grid refinement and the amount of noise in the data is also investigated. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.