Mathematical and numerical study of a three-dimensional inverse eddy current problem

Abstract: We study an inverse problem associated with an eddy current model. We first address the ill-posedness of the inverse problem by proving the compactness of the forward map with respect to the conductivity and the non-uniqueness of the recovery process. Then by virtue of non-radiating source conceptions, we establish a regularity result for the tangential trace of the true solution on the boundary, which is necessary to justify our subsequent mathematical formulation. After that, we formulate the inverse problem as a constrained optimization problem with an appropriate regularization and prove the existence and stability of the regularized minimizers. To facilitate the numerical solution of the nonlinear non-convex constrained optimization, we introduce a feasible Lagrangian and its discrete variant. Then the gradient of the objective functional is derived using the adjoint technique. By means of the gradient, a nonlinear conjugate gradient method is formulated for solving the optimization system, and a Sobolev gradient is incorporated to accelerate the iterative process. Numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed algorithm.