A three-dimensional boundary determination problem in potential corrosion damage

In this paper we consider the identification of the geometric structure of the boundary of the solution domain for the three-dimensional Laplace equation. We investigate the determination of the shape of an unknown portion of the boundary of a solution domain from Cauchy data on the remaining portion of the boundary. This problem arises in the study of quantitative non-destructive evaluation of corrosion in materials in which boundary measurements of currents and voltages are used to determine the material loss caused by corrosion. The domain identification problem is considered as a variational problem to minimize a defect functional, which utilises some additional data on certain known parts of the boundary. A sequential quadratic programming (SQP) optimization algorithm is used in order to minimise the objective functional. The unknown boundary is parameterized using B-splines. The Laplace equation is discretised using the method of fundamental solutions (MFS). Numerical results are presented and discussed for several test examples.