Inverse determination of spatially varying material coefficients in solid objects

Material properties such as thermal conductivity, magnetic permeability, electric permittivity, modulus of elasticity, Poisson's ratio, thermal expansion coefficient, etc. can vary spatially throughout a given solid object as it is the case in functionally graded materials. Finding this spatial variation is an inverse problem that requires boundary values of the field quantity such as temperature, magnetic field potential or electric field potential and its derivatives normal to the boundaries. In this paper, we solve the direct problem of predicting the spatial distribution of the field variable based on its measured boundary values and on the assumed spatial distribution of the diffusion coefficient using radial basis functions, the finite volume method and the finite element method, whose accuracies are verified against analytical solutions. Minimization of the sum of normalized least-squares differences between the calculated and measured values of the field quantity at the boundaries then leads to the correct parameters in the analytic model for the spatial distribution of the spatially varying material property.